GI At The Movies: Life 2.0

I went into a screening of Life 2.0, a new documentary about the people who obsessively log in to the virtual world Second Life, expecting to laugh. These will be nerds, I reasoned, who are quantifiably nerdier than I am. Instead of laughter, I ended up sitting through the majority of the movie with a sort of quiet anxiety, a thoughtful nervousness at what was transpiring on-screen mixed with a growing desire to get out of the theater as quickly as possible. I found the source of these emotions about halfway through the film when I realized that I had a lot more in common with the people being chronicled on-screen than I wanted to admit.

At several points throughout the film, Second Life in its current state is compared to the Internet back in the early to mid-‘90s. I started using the Internet around 1995 -- just as my age hit double digits -- via a crappy public computer at the small library in my hometown. From the first time I signed on, I was addicted. I would walk to the library nearly every day after school and whenever I could on Saturdays, and I would sign up on a clipboard and be allowed one hour of Internet use before I had to give up the keyboard to someone else. Whenever possible, I would stretch that hour out, stealing extra minutes here and there to spend in a role-playing chatroom I had discovered.

Life 2.0 follows four main characters who have taken role-playing to a level 10-year-old Phil could barely have imagined. A man hides his identity from the camera due to the strangeness of his chosen role in Second Life: as a young girl. A business-savvy woman decides to turn her passion for gaming into a money-maker by creating a popular in-game clothing line. And a couple that finds love in the virtual world learn to deal with the consequences of emotional infidelity from their real-life partners.

That last pair produce some of the most conflicting moments in the film, snippets of a developing romance that are at once moving, hilarious, awkward, and painful. As I watched them play out an incredibly goofy virtual sex scene (complete with whispering sweet nothings that reminded me how stupid flirtation often sounds to a third party), I was able to forget that they are married and have children outside of the game. Like their online passion, though, the buzz cannot last. Much of the real-life portion of the film is devoted to the breakdown of their two families followed by their attempt to build a new life together. For anyone who has gone through a divorce or a difficult break-up or watched their parents do so, these parts of the film come across as brutal reminders of the reality that Second Life users theoretically want to avoid.

That’s the real trick of Life 2.0. I started watching the film believing that virtual reality was an escape from real life and was slowly convinced that, if anything, virtual reality becomes an enhancement for real life, brings out secrets you may not have even realized exist. The man who takes on the role of a young girl in Second Life slowly forces himself to remember trauma from his past. The entrepreneur finds her business struggling in rhythm with the real-world economy. Though I will not spoil the most heartbreaking moment of the film, I will say that it involves the illicit couple. Unsavory acts in real life betray sketchy actions in Second Life betray further questionable motivations in real life. The film leaves it to the viewers to decide if the ability certain people have to quickly change who they are is something inherent to them or something that virtual reality has brought out or at least refined.

The screening of Life 2.0 that I attended was at South by Southwest (SXSW), a huge film, music, and tech conference held yearly in Austin, TX. On my first night at the conference, I marveled at how tech-savvy the crowd was, at how even in the midst of a party, so many people were glued to their cell phones (myself included), constantly checking Twitter, e-mail, and text messages.  Sure enough, after the film ended, I saw cell phones quickly begin to light up across the theater (again, myself included). Though the film never explicitly states this, it occurred to me that the dependence many of us have developed for our online identities has become its own kind of second life, one that we are now constantly tethered to via our mobile devices. For better or for worse, more and more people around the world are defined by their virtual interactions.

At one point in the movie, one of the main characters decides to leave Second Life for good, and we get to see reactions of sadness and anger from his online friends. A few months after I'd started visiting that chatroom as a kid, one of the people I'd grown attached to, a 13-year-old girl from across the country (or so she told me), decided she had outgrown the place. At the time, I was devastated by this choice. Though I would forget all about that chatroom and the time I'd spent there within a year, I was crushed to be losing someone I now considered a close friend.

Late in the film, they interview one of the heads of Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life. In discussing the success of their product, he notes how Second Life allows for interactions where people are not at risk of physical harm. If nothing else, the brilliantly-edited Life 2.0 serves as a crucial lesson for this digital age: Though people may only be at emotional risk online, the risk is still very real, and our virtual interactions truly do affect real life.

As of the screening that I attended last week, Life 2.0's creators have not found a distributor for wide release but are actively looking. If you're interested in seeing the film, you can keep up to date on the latest developments on the official Life 2.0 website.