Apologies that I couldn't get this review in in time for the screening on Friday as part of the Fringe Festival, but I had relatives in town and needed to play host.

"Second Skin" is a documentary about a subject I know well: people who play online role-playing games like "Second Life" and "World of Warcraft." My qualifications as an expert on this topic are pretty solid -- I've been playing video games since the 1970s, I wrote an in-depth article on video game addiction last year, and I've been playing World of War craft since February 2006 (minus a 7-month hiatus that ended this March).

Director Juan Carlos Pineiro-Escoriaza takes a sobering and enlightening look at people who play Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games - MMORPGs - many of whom evidently prefer their online lives to their corporeal ones. As one might expect, the documentary tends to focus on hardcore players and those who are truly addicted. One guy from Philadelphia loses his job, his house, his girlfriend, his health and his self-respect in order to keep on playing.

Perhaps the most fascinating subjects are a foursome of Fort Wayne guys who all play WoW. (One of them refers to Fort Wayne as the "Shangri-La of gaming.") When an expansion of the game comes out, not only do they line up outside the store at midnight to be among the first to buy it, but they call in sick to work for several days in a row in order to play the game non-stop. But real-life tensions keep intruding - two of the guys get married in the course of the film, and one has twins with his wife. By the end, it's clear that half the group is moving one way, and the other half are staying in the game.

And there's the usual uber-nerdy conventions where gamers get together, dress funny and do silly things.

But the doc always goes a step past the obvious. One of the subjects forcefully argues that playing video games may be a waste of time to some people, but those same people probably waste a lot of their time watching football on TV, tinkering around in the garage or doing some strange hobby that only they and a few of their friends care about.

There's also a whole spate of interviews of couples who met through their online interactions. One of the most hilarious sequences shows a couple getting married at a gaming convention in full fantasy costumes, then sitting down to paired computers to get hitched in the digital world, too. But most of the couples are surprisingly normal, working through the expectations and false assumptions that form a barrier to getting past the first blush of love.

Also mesmerizing is a section - too short, really - of people with physical disabilities who enjoy interacting as an able-bodied person in these virtual worlds.

"Second Skin" does what the best documentaries do: introduces you to a community with which you may not be familiar. At first you may find the people dwelling in these online realities strange and even laughable, but over time you come to see who they are and why they do what they do.

3.5 stars out of four.