Pakistani comedian Sami Shah has been featured more than once by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. Almost a year ago Hamlet posted : Comedian Who Got His Start Performing Live in Second Life from Pakistan Gets His Own Show on the BBC.
More recently Sami has been talking to John Bailey of The Sydney Morning Herald : Sami Shah’s second life as a comedian. The reason Sami is talking to the Australian press is because he has been performing in Australia and will be performing, I MIGRANT & Other Stories by Sami Shah at The Cooper’s Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne April 5th – 17th as part of a comedy festival.
The reason “Second Life” is in the title of The Sydney Morning Herald article is of course because Sami used to perform in Second Life at a comedy club :
It was just people coming on and reading joke books, so I started performing there two or three times per week. The audience was all from America and England, so I’d wake up just to be there when they logged in, and in Pakistan that was six in the morning. I ended up earning a few hundred dollars doing comedy in Second Life in Pakistan for at least a year or two.
What this really exemplifies is how Virtual Worlds such as Second Life can give an artist worldwide reach. There’s no two hour drive to the venue involved and if you bomb in a virtual world, well, you have another advantage, you can reinvent yourself.
Virtual Worlds of course come with other restrictions, audiences are likely to be small and they are not likely to want to pay a lot to see an act, so it’s unlikely to be a get rich quick route to success, but you can attain some decent reach to parts of the world you’re unlikely to be able to reach from performing locally in the physical world.
I would imagine that at some point, if Virtual Reality really takes off, things will change in terms of audience sizes and paid content, but we’re certainly not there yet.
Second Life of course isn’t the only platform where artists can perform, Aluna George recently performed in Minecraft DIY Magazine reports :
Last week, AlunaGeorge took to your cousin’s favourite digital Lego simulator Minecraft for the world’s first performance inside a video game. How very 2016.
Well, without wanting to get into arguments about whether Second Life, or even Minecraft are games, this wasn’t really a first for video games, however it is interesting to see artists embracing technology in this fashion.
DIY Magazine also reports on the rather odd Second Life experiences of musician Father John Misty, as told via his Instagram account :
It’s no secret that Father John Misty’s a fan of “free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using free voice and text chat” (snooze) Second Life. He dedicated his entire Instagram feed to it for months, telling DIY last year that it soon started to leak into his IRL existence. “I started finding SecondLife photos that represented what I was actually doing,” he explained, “So if I was in London, I’d find a SecondLife photo of London. And then my friends who live there would be like, ‘oh, I saw that you’re in London!’” Bit creepy, really.
I really don’t know what to make of Father John Misty’s Instagram account record of his Second Life adventures, some of the photos are odd to say the least and really not safe for work.
However the wider issue is that Virtual Worlds have use cases that people overlook when they’re wondering what this sort of technology can be used for, despite the use cases having been tried and tested to a small degree. The future is likely to see more musicians, comedians and hopefully, storytellers using Virtual Worlds and that is something that should give more people reason to embrace Virtual Worlds, at which point, we will need to build bigger comedy clubs!