20130917: Documentary Review--Life 2.0

Life 2.0

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action and animated feature length film, 2010, NR, 100 minutes, documentary.
2. IMDB: 5.9/10.0 from 202 users.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 89% on the meter; 48% liked it from 171 audience ratings.
4. Directed by: Jason Spingarn-Koff.


2. Setup and Plot
1. The discrepancy between the critics and the ticket buyers on Rotten Tomatoes was rather large.  This does not bode well.


2. Life 2.0 refers to Second Life, an animated, shared, massively multi-user application.  Real life companies have meetings in board rooms in buildings in SL.  People buy islands, land parcels, and buildings in SL.  People run businesses in SL.  It has its own economy, currency, geography, and a host of sub-cultures.


3. One equivalence stated was 1000 lindens (SL currency) was exchangeable for 3.50 USD.  There is an in-game bank that enables exchanges of USD to lindens and back.  During 2009, an estimated 500 million USD were exchanged between SL and real life.  Those who learn how to build in SL can sell services, houses, vehicles, clothes, and the like in SL and get USD in return. Conversely, those with disposable USD, can have a luxurious time in Second Life.


4. The film largely follows the four avatars, Asri Falcone, Amie Goode, Bluntly Berblinger, and Ayya Aabye.   Asri builds and sells clothing in the game and makes money.  Amie and Bluntly are bonded in the game, and somewhat outside the game.  They experience things together in SL; she's married to someone else in real life.  Ayya is an 11-year old girl, whose creator is an engaged man in his thirties.


5. Creepy moments: Ayya's creator discusses what he gets out of portraying a young girl avatar.  His wife is not positively impressed.  His over-spending of time in SL has endangered his job, his marriage, and his health.  Sounds like addiction: users saying sleep was only done out of necessity.


6. The slick, sleek, entrepreneurial type, Asri Falcone, in Second Life turns out to be a person who spends most of her time in a basement in a so-so part of Detroit.  On the other hand, Asri's efforts in SL more than pay for the monthly fees for playing the game.  In fact, for at least one year before the film's release, she was making over 100,000 USD per year from SL, and helped support her elderly parents.


7. Real life and Second Life are sometimes at odds: budding romance in Second Life is confounded by Real life mates, children, real property and other commitments. 


8. It is illegal for real life children to operate in Second Life, at all, period.  Despite this, there are many child avatars, child schools, friendships that involve exploration in SL with other child friends. As well as schools, there are adoption centers where child avatars get matched with pairs of adult avatars.


9. Ayya's creator got himself kicked out of SL by having the avatar do a suicide bombing run.  Linden Labs considered this a denial of service attack, and suspended his account.  That seemed the only way Ayya's creator could get out of the game, given his psychology.  The first time he got suspended for 24 hours; he was hoping for more.  That was a wake-up, and he decides to delete Ayya on the six months anniversary of his joining SL.


10. Gaming the game: when the servers underlying SL would crash, on reboot they sometimes created extra copies of objects, including merchant inventory.  So, some hackers were able to produce many such crashes, which resulted in numerous copies being made, which they snapped up and sold at reduced prices.  The merchants adversely affected by this, including Asri, went to court to get this fixed. This hit about the same time as the real life Great Recession, so the SL economy went into a slower mode as well.  Asri's ability to make money in SL went down severely, and her savings eventually ran out.


11. Steven (Bluntly) and Amie (Amie) live in Alberta, CA and New York, USA.  They started meeting for short times.  Both of them separated from their spouses, and are trying to find a feasible plan for being together in real life.


12. Down the tubes: Ayya and his finance break up after he cuts himself out of SL.  He goes back to SL, but realizes what a mess he is.  Steven and Amie tried to be together, and find that it does not work.  They do not work together for day-to-day real tasks as they did with their time exploring in SL.  Asri does not recover the same income she once had in SL. The successful lawsuit against the virtual perpetrator only yielded about 525 USD for six plaintiffs.  Still, she makes a whole new set of businesses, does a lot more to protect her copyrights and brands in the game, and again makes significant money.


3. Conclusions
1. One sentence summary: Things can go wrong in the virtual worlds too.
2. Three stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 4/10 Streamed in HD from Netflix.  This was a total waste, since SL does not have a high enough polygon density to warrant this.  It looks grainy, second rate, poor, all the way through the film.  The 'real' life photography is iffy, showing quite a number of zooming, framing, and focus mistakes.  Jumpy hand-held look. Some of the second half 'real' life camera work was reasonably good.  Toward the very end of the film, much later versions of SL show vastly improved animation. This is only for about 1 minute. Most of the SL footage is just terrible.


2. Sound: 6/10 OK, but sometimes indifferent to fuzzy.


3. Screenplay: 6/10 The stories to be told were told well.  However, it seems a bit lopsided.  The three main stories were about a couple who left their former spouses then failed romantically in real life; a childhood abuse victim using SL instead of a shrink; one of the exceptional few who actually made money off of SL.  Companies that use SL for business meetings?  Not represented.  People who just have a good time?  I did not see much of that.  So many common cases were not represented at all.