Posted: Tue 04 Mar 2008 16:29 Post subject: Second Life From a Performer's Perspective
Second Life From a Performer's Perspective
Performers who also web surf might want to look into Second Life as an appreciative and profitable venue.
Second Life (abbreviated "SL") is a virtual-reality world with hundreds of cities and towns where you can go shopping, make friends, hold down a job, watch live entertainment, and perform before live audiences. In SL's 3D illusion you manipulate a puppet-like figure called an "avatar" that represents your persona and interacts with others. You can clothe your avatar however you wish. You can make it of any age or shape, indeed of either gender.
Gorgeous Slender Young Things
As you might expect, most avatars are gorgeous slender young things, but not necessarily. Those of Frank and Mary Lee Sweet resemble their real-life ("RL") bodies, dressed out in the same Civil War period dress that they wear when performing for real. SL has about four million registered members. Of these, about fifty thousand are on line at any given moment. The numbers are growing daily, so potential audiences are huge.
Tech-wise, the way it works is that you download a free client application (called a Second-Life viewer) onto your computer and run it. Like a web browser, it provides internet access to thousands of different servers running different SL worlds. In SL, the thousands of worlds are called "sims," not "websites," but the structure resembles the world-wide web. The main difference is that when you visit a website with an internet browser, you do not know how many other visitors are at the same web site at the same time, much less can you interact nor communicate with them. But when you visit an SL sim using the SL viewer you can see around you the avatars of all of the other visitors present. You can talk to them and interact with them in different ways.
Each Sim is a World of Its Own
Each of SL's thousands of sims is a virtual world of its own. Each has its own architectural style, ambience, rules of conduct, even laws of physics. Most performance venues mimic real-life clubs (rock, jazz, hip-hop in a modern-day setting). But some regions reflect ancient Rome, medieval Europe (both actual and fantasy), the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, and countless others. We recently attended a traditional storytelling performance in Victorian England, where the teller (named Gilbert Sapwood) told stories by famed Irish bard, Eddie Lenihan.
Our first gig in SL was last Christmas. We sang 19-century Christmas Carols in a town simulating Deadwood, South Dakota as of 1876. We stood on a wooden sidewalk, facing an unpaved street where dozens of people in period dress gathered in the falling snow to listen. Some even paired up and waltzed, spinning around in the street to carols in 3/4 time (like "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"). It reminded us of the audiences in the Cumberland Plateau (western VA and NC, eastern TN and KY), where if people do not get up and dance in the aisles, it means that you are doing something wrong. After the post-show socializing, when people began to drift away, we bade our farewells, closed the SL windows on our computers, and were instantly back in our living-room in ordinary clothes.
Beam Me Up
Although SL has highways, ships, and railroads, they are used only for recreation. In practice, you go from place to place by flying like superman for short distances or by teleporting anywhere within SL instantly like Scotty of the Enterprise.
Consider the impact of teleportation. It means that if you have a niche market then every fan of your specialty in the universe can instantly teleport to wherever you perform. It means that you can teleport to your next gig. It means that during your show, you and every member of your audience are actually sitting at home at computers. No travel time. No gasoline. No hotels. No campsites. Just performing. To the audience, it is like watching television (except that they can talk to each other and cheer the performer). To the artist, it is like performing on television (except that you can see and hear the audience reacting).
Teleportation is so convenient, in fact, that Mary Lee and I often practice in public by busking. Here is how it works. We announce to our fans the place and time of our next practice, usually in a public square or green. Then we teleport to the spot, set up our instruments and put out our tip jar. As we start performing, our fans begin materializing around us. After a half-hour of stories and songs we thank the folks for coming, bid farewell, collect our instruments and tip jar, and vanish back into real life.
Marketing Yourself
It costs nothing to join SL. Just go to http://secondlife.com and download the viewer. Once you choose a ready-made avatar (you can change it later) and enter the SL universe, you will materialize on "Orientation Island" where you are taught, step by step, how to interact with the SL world around you.
Performing is simple once you are moving around and exploring, especially for storytellers or unaccompanied vocalists. All you need is one of those computer earphone/microphone headsets sold in office supplies and computer stores. For groups, or for those who accompany themselves on instruments, you will need two or more ordinary microphones and a small mixer board to combine their audio before feeding it into your computer's line-in jack. Come to think of it, for better sound quality, many small mixers nowadays come with USB output, so you can just plug the mixer's output into the computer's USB port and skip its sound card entirely. Of course, you must still market yourself, audition for venue owners, or stand on street-corners playing for tips. But that is no different from real life.
Our first failed attempt to market ourselves was by hosting a weekly open mic at our bookstore (more about the bookstore in a moment). We advertised a series of open mic concerts and expected to MC for other performers for several weeks until we had collected a bunch of regulars. Of course, we were prepared to go on stage ourselves if no performers showed up. In the event, over a two-week period, we attracted only two other performers: a stand-up comic and a banjo-picker. Both were artistically competent, but neither was able to manage the SL audio very well. Since Mary Lee and I are quite comfortable with the technical aspects of audio management, we resolved thenceforth to simply perform on our own.
Chat, Streaming, and Voice
A word about SL audio. Due to its idiosyncratic historical evolution, Second Life supports three independent (and incompatible) communications systems: "chat," "streaming," and "voice." The Second Life universe was originally silent, and all communication was conducted by what is confusingly called "chat." You type words into your computer and read others' replies on your screen. Despite technological advances in recent years, almost all ad hoc communication in SL is still via the "chat" system (typed words). This has two odd effects.
First, Second Life participants almost always automatically communicate in this way, even when it seems counterintuitive. For example, as indicated above, we perform using audio collected by our microphones and fed into Second Life through our mixer and our computer's sound card. In order to hear us, each member of the audience must have either earphones or loudspeakers connected to their computer. Since most computer earphones already come with a built-in microphone, audience members can also speak and have their voices heard by others in the audience and by the performers on stage. Nevertheless, when I perform a particularly impressive riff on the banjo, or Mary Lee tells a moving tale, the response is usually just a flurry of typed messages flashing on-screen: "Yeah!", "Great!", "clap clap!", "applause!", and on rare occasions, the typed words, "wild applause!", all in dead silence.
The other quirky effect is that some SL participants feel that audio destroys the essence the experience, which, they believe, is meant to resemble cellphone texting. Some are vehement in their rejection of audio. On one occasion we agreed to perform a concert for pay at a saloon in a wild-west sim. We thought that the owner understood our act, but a few days before the show I was putting up posters and the owner suddenly asked "You're not planning to use audio, are you?" I affirmed that we were, and he cancelled the gig on the spot. Apparently, he felt that live sound would detract from the show. I began to ask how anyone could play a music concert by just texting, but he was not interested in discussing it. As it turns out, some story-telling venues accept only storytellers who text their stories, typing them in, one line at a time.
The second form of communication, "streaming audio" requires that the source (Mary Lee and me) provide a URL that sends out an audio stream, like an internet radio station. The performer can set the sim (or sim parcel) to receive audio from that URL, and this audio stream is then fed to the SL viewers of all the avatars present. This obsolescent system is used by most performers in SL today, but it is losing ground. It has the advantage of providing an audio buffer or cache to the SL viewers (about one minute's audio delay). The Internet is notorious for erratic transmission times and so non-streamed audio sent over the net typically breaks up badly or loses sound quality. The delay provided by the streaming method smoothes out transmission, giving the listener an experience more like a radio program than a phone call. The drawback of streaming from the performers' viewpoint is that your avatar visibly starts playing a full minute before the sound starts, and when you stop playing, your avatar stops immediately but the sound continues for one full minute. This makes it impossible to gesture, bow, wave, or perform any of the actions necessary to a live performance. In practice, to the audience a streaming performance is like listening to a radio in front a wooden statue of the performer. Mary Lee and I do not employ streaming because our combination of storytelling, snake-oil speechifying, and music demands a TV-like presentation.
The third form of audio is called "voice." In this technology, the audio stream is sent along with the video stream and distributed by the sim's server, rather than through a separate URL, thus synchronizing audio with video. This method enables a truly TV-like experience for the audience. On the down-side, the technology has been available only since the summer of 2007. Also, until recently each listener had to configure their own SL viewer to handle "voice" and many SL participants did not know how to do this. We have been rejected at auditions when we say that we use the "voice" system because venue owners simply cannot believe that audiences can be taught to reconfigure their SL viewers. Nevertheless, we find that most people can do this without a serious problem when we show them how. The final drawback is that, since it uses a shorter audio buffer it is more vulnerable to internet traffic interruptions, breaking up occasionally. In any event, SL is committed to the "voice" system, is constantly improving it, and the latest release of the viewer comes already configured for "voice" by default. "Voice" is definitely the way to go for new interactive live performers such as storytellers and musicians
The Money is Real
The money is real. The SL currency is the "$Linden," but you can convert $Lindens to dollars (or whatever) and back again instantly at any time. The average DAILY cash flow within SL is around two and one-half million U.S. dollars. The way it works is that your avatar has a running balance of $Lindens. You add to the balance by buying $Lindens (at about 275 per US dollar) with a credit card, paypal, or bank transfer, or by selling products or services within Second Life. You consume the balance by selling $Lindens (at about 280 per US dollar) and having the money deposited to paypal or a bank account, or by buying products and services within Second Life. For instance, if you put $L1000 (about US$3.60) into our tip jar, your $Linden balance drops and ours rises by that amount.
Mary Lee and I first entered Second Life to sell books, not to perform. We rented a storefront on a quiet sim specifically designed for publishers, booksellers, and authors. Today, customers can visit the Backintyme Bookstore and buy either real-life copies or virtual-reality copies of our books. When you touch a virtual-reality copy of any book in our store, it opens that book's web page where you can order a real-life copy with a credit card. Alternatively, you can buy the virtual-reality copy itself at a much lower price. You then own the virtual-reality copy and can take with you, but then you must be in Second Life in order to open it and read it (it is not a physical paper copy, after all).
We started performing simply to attract customers to the bookstore. In addition to music, we also host classes and discussions on the U.S. color line. We host two one-hour lectures on racialism every Wednesday evening, from 8 to 9 eastern and again from 9 to 10. The way these work, I give a half-hour PowerPoint presentation on a topic usually taken from my dissertation, "Legal History of the Color Line," and then the group spends the next half hour discussing it. To our surprise, although the lectures and discussions on the U.S. color line are attended by a very different crowd, they have turned out to be as popular as our music concerts and just as lucrative. (Admission is free but we put out the tip jar.)
All in all, the marketing, publicity, planning, organizing, and conducting of performances in Second Life is remarkably similar to real life. We plan and perform our musical concerts just as we do for real-life stages. We plan and conduct our lectures and discussions on racialism as we do for real-life classrooms. As mentioned earlier, one obvious difference is the impact of teleportation.
Don't Miss a Beat When Someone is Shot to Death in Front of the Stage
Another unexpected difference is the impact of role-playing. As mentioned above, most sims mimic real-life sites but some regions depict ancient Rome, the Star Wars universe, the U.S. wild west, and so forth. Many participants of such role-playing sims act out the fantasy premise of their sim. Since we perform only 19th-century music, we are often hired to perform in wild west saloons. It is disconcerting when a gunfight breaks out and someone is shot to death in front of the stage while you are performing. You can easily miss a beat the first time that it happens. On one occasion, in fact, outlaws came into town, kidnapped the banjo-picker (me), and demanded a ransom. The mayor took up a collection from the townsfolk and paid them, but they murdered me anyway (one muttered something about not liking banjo music).
Intelligent Penguins, Giraffes, and Dragons
Similarly, you can don any avatar you wish, even a non-human one. For obvious reasons, people who attend our racialism discussions are often reluctant to reveal their own ethnic self-identity. And so, while our musical shows are usually attended by Civil War soldiers, Victorian Brits, and cowboys, our racialism discussions are often attended by attentive and articulate penguins, giraffes, and dragons.
Once you have joined SL and finished Orientation Island, if you have any questions about performing in SL please feel free to email me or IM to "Raymond Frog" (you will quickly learn what that means).
Last edited by fwsweet on Sun 09 Mar 2008 16:13; edited 6 times in total
I wonder if I could make tips on Second Life as a Microbiology tutor. Hmmmm.
Actually, that is quite probable. There are many colleges and universities that offer classes in SL (for the same reason that many corporations are using it for training classes--it is cheaper than having students travel to where the teacher is or vice-versa). Teachers in the hard sciences are often in short supply, so you should be able to set up your own tutoring in the same fashion. Alternatively, you could just go ahead and conduct a course under the aegis of an accredited school, assuming that they like your syllabus (or you are willing to use theirs). If you wish, I could look around and get a list of the colleges that offer courses in SL.
I wonder if I could make tips on Second Life as a Microbiology tutor. Hmmmm.
Actually, that is quite probable. There are many colleges and universities that offer classes in SL (for the same reason that many corporations are using it for training classes--it is cheaper than having students travel to where the teacher is or vice-versa). Teachers in the hard sciences are often in short supply, so you should be able to set up your own tutoring in the same fashion. Alternatively, you could just go ahead and conduct a course under the aegis of an accredited school, assuming that they like your syllabus (or you are willing to use theirs). If you wish, I could look around and get a list of the colleges that offer courses in SL.
Oh, wow. Thanks. It sounds interesting. I actually teach several online Biology and Microbiology "lectures" each semester, but I don't use any audio. It's all reading, PowerPoint viewing, interacting on discussion boards - that sort of thing. Well, I reckon I might have to check SL out after all.
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Hmmmm. 