Second Life is an international community, as exemplified by this official YouTube Video:
This has absolutely sod all to do with this blog post, but I love that accent! Well it has a spurious link, the issue I want to talk about is bringing authors to Second Life. On my Twitter feed I have a few authors, writing is of course all about the imagination, but I think Second Life is missing a trick by not reaching out to the creative talent of authors.
Authors create visions, you can deliver those visions in a 3D world, which Second Life is. So how do we go about encouraging the creativty of authors being delivered in Second Life? We certainly don’t do it via notecards. I’d love to see an improved notecard system that could at least deliver HTML books.
Authors are not likely to be 3D artists, they also may not want to spoil one of the beauties of reading, a reader creating in their own mind a vision of how a world looks. However it happens in film, so why isn’t it happening in Second Life? Well I think we know the answer there, the tier is too damn high.
An author could do a decent promotion of their book in a sim if they partner with the right builders and right scripters.
Storytelling is something that does happen in Second Life, be it via the excellent Seanchai Library, or roleplaying or other form, there’s many a story told in Second Life.
Maybe authors could liaise with ventures such as Seanchai, which is a very worthy venture and offer to do voluntary readings there. I don’t work with the Seanchai folk so I don’t know if such an idea would be welcome, but it certainly has potential. I’d certainly like to see more authors embracing Second Life in some form.
Storytelling is an art at its heart and a very wonderful art, it should be actively encouraged in Second Life to bring new depth to a very old art form, but there’s no easy answer to how we can bridge the gap of the tier being too damn high and encouraging stories within this wonderful virtual world.
We talked about this before..well some of it. One of the most well known authors that I know has been in SL is Dean Koontz. Not sure of any others. I would LOVE to get Stephen King into SL just to see his avatar! Well maybe for more reasons than that. I know Ciaran I am full off useless knowledge!
Jez
We had Terry Pratchett!
http://sl.governormarley.com/?p=235
We also had Gene Roddenberry Jr, although he’s not an author, you took me to hear him speak!
I don’t know any famous authors but I do know that SL is home to a large community of writers, many of whom compete along with me in NaNoWriMo every November. (Sci-fi/fantasy is popular — what a fit for SL.) Some artists tell stories through their immersive art (Bryn Oh is a brilliant storyteller) and if the story “build” was compelling perhaps some of the bigger galleries would display the work?
~Cat
NanoWriMo is a great event, I’ll have to look for SL groups for that this year and Bryn Oh is very impressive.