Not so much a documentary of an Internet phenomenon as a deconstruction of 21st-century culture, Jason Spingarn-Koff’s unsettling film explores the online game Second Life, in which players create avatars to live in a virtual world. Said players include the couple who, when their avatars fall in love, take the relationship into the real world, dissolving their respective marriages in the process.
And the woman whose avatar sells virtual products that bringing in virtual money — which she changes into real dollars amounting to six figures a year. And the troubled young man whose avatar, an 11-year-old girl, is causing him problems with his fiancée. These seeming addicts play the game as much as 20 hours a day, often disrupting their lives and imprisoning themselves in a world of illusion.
Or it the world to come? As one surprise resolution suggests, sometimes escaping the world means facing the truth.
