Tonight at 7pm SLT Caledonia Skytower will be doing a reading of Mircale on 34th Street at Seanchai Library. The reading will be in voice, which means it won’t be suitable for all and the reading is at 7pm SLT, which means it won’t be suitable for all! However that’s the nature of a worldwide platform. However this is a seasonal tale to get you into the spirit of the season.
The story will be read in two parts, with part two on December 10th, I believe! Seanchai isn’t the only place in Second Life that engages in storytelling, indeed we have storytelling on one of my sims, but not anywhere near as regularly as Seanchai does and with nowhere near the variety, but it does happen and I’m happy to see it happening.
I do believe that storytelling and even reading, within Second Life, is an undervalued art. Reading of course has its own pitfalls, texture loading times or reading notecards, it’s not exactly easy on the eye and yet, with 3D props, it has potential to add to the form of storytelling by recreating locations, or readers getting in character.
I can remember reading on a forum once, a post from a guy who wanted to go from place to place in Second Life telling stories. The concept is a good one, the problem is promotion, setting the event up and of course, tier. Telling stories in itself might not sound expensive, but location can be. This is why a place like Seanchai, with regular storytelling in a set place, can spread the word and from what I can see, they’re doing a damn good job of it.
Second Life certainly has the potential to be useful tool in the storytelling stakes, self publicising authors could even think about creating the world of their story in Second Life and do a brief promotional. However some people prefer their own imagination to create a world and may be put off by an author doing so, swings and roundabouts. Then there’s the issue of short term tier costs being quite astronomical if you want a short term rental from Linden Lab.
Yet you can’t help thinking that Linden Lab are missing a trick here too, with people like Emily Short of interactive fiction fame onboard, one would think that maybe developments could be made to bring some sort of interactive fiction to Second Life. Emily Short is as far I’m aware, not working on Second Life, but is working on other Linden Lab projects such as Versu, which we should be hearing more about shortly.
However storytelling is an art form that doesn’t require Linden Lab to do anything other than keep the grid running for it to work right now, I just feel that advances could be made to give it more oomph within Second Life.
The Seanchai people are making a good fist of it at the moment, let’s hope more join them.
SLURL to Seanchai Library: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Imagination%20Island/46/211/28
Hi Ciaran – Thanks for the good words! Our motto at Seanchai Library is that “We bring good stories – of all types – to life in Second Life”. We have stories Mon-Thurs at 7pm, but we also have stories during the day on weekends for those in other time zones. Indeed, all of our stories are in voice, since we feel that is the best way to bring life to the printed word. Anyone interested can drop by and slap our subscriber kiosk, and they’ll get notices. Thanks again!
Derry McMahon – Librarian
Thanks for the comment Derry, I’ve been there for a look a couple of times now and the setup is very nice and informative.
*agreed*
-ls/cm
This article is spot on. I’ve done a bit of reading myself, and some even at Seanchai, and it’s been quite a bit of fun. I’ve had to go on hiatus for a number of RL reasons but I do hope to return. The main problem I found was promotion. I am strictly a free account avatar and own no property, thus I relied on the good graces of sim owners to promote my appearances. I do believe that the management of Second Life could have done a great deal more to help promote my presentations (they did nothing). There isn’t even an event announcing mechanism for itinerant readers. Nevertheless, I always looked forward to any and all opportunities. Speaking of Caledonia, she is one of the most valuable assets in SL for story telling and reading.
Errr I think you’re the guy I was talking about when I referred to a forum post, it was over at SLUniverse and about a new avatar as an itinerant story teller. I’ve found the post again now as your name rang a bell.