Life 2.0: Documentary about Second Life March 23, 2010

I’ve been using the virtual environment of Second Life and Visuland for years now to organize conferences or just small meetings. I also published a whole e-guide focusing on this issue. But this documentary recently selected for Sundance Film Festival is something really unique. The director and creator is Jason Spingarn-Koff.

This feature-length documentary follows a group of people whose lives are dramatically transformed by the virtual world Second Life. They enter a new reality, whose inhabitants assume alternate personas in the form of avatars. The film is foremost an intimate, character-based drama about people who look to a virtual world in search of something they are missing in their real lives.

A young woman in Detroit becomes a star designer of virtual clothes and houses; an American and a Canadian fall in love online then struggle to build a real life together; a man creates the avatar of an 11-year-old girl who he believes is an expression of his subconscious.

The results are unexpected and often disturbing: reshaping relationships, identities, and ultimately the very notion of reality.