I don’t get Second Life. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I get World of Warcraft* and Everquest and other MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing games) like that – they’re games, after all, and everybody my generation or younger has lost some time to an engrossing game at one point or another. But Second Life isn’t a game as far as I can tell. It seems to be an especially lame chat program or something. You create characters and then just… do stuff. Apparently some people have jobs in the game. It appears to be absolutely fucking dumb.
Last year Alexandra Alter published an article in the Wall Street Journal about a guy who was addicted to Second Life. In real life he’s a 50something chainsmoking fat dude with diabetes but in the game he’s some kind of a hunk. He’s married in real life and to a different woman in Second Life. As you can imagine, his real wife takes issue with this. For some reason she puts up with it.
While this may sound like a Jerry Springer segment waiting to happen, it’s also going to be a Gore Verbinski movie. The Pirates of the Caribbean director is signed on to make a movie based on this article, a film that will tackle the tough issues of game addiction and cybercheating. Eastern Promises writer Steven Knight is scripting.
This is not a joke.
Especially delicious about this: Verbinski is making an adaptation of the video game Bioshock. Doubly delicious: there’s a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO.
I hope Verbinski and Universal, who is producing, see this as a prestige picture. I can’t imagine why the hell else you would make this, unless it’s going to be a dark, dark comedy. I would actually like to see the Coen Bros make a film about MMO addiction.
* admission: I have become a casual WoW player in the past year.