Cracking Walnuts With Refrigerators
Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) has posted a really perceptive critique of the challenges of mounting a play in the virtual world of Second Life. “Putting on a play using Second Life is a bit like trying to crack a walnut with a refrigerator,” Giff says. I’m not going to try to disentagle the simile, but I love the image. Giff points out the limitations of humanoid avatars and text chat for conveying the kinds of emotions that plays need to get across, and ponders a more Second Life-like possibility:
What else can heighten emotional content so the audience engages more fully? How about the actor forms themselves? Instead of using the humanoid, mesh-based frames most people wear in Second Life, how about using less-realistic, prim-based characters where emotions and expressions can be exaggerated in an almost bunraku style? I also think it would be useful to hearken back to silent movies where everything was done with motion and music/soundtrack.
I love the idea of really using the capabilities of the platform for what they’re best at. Unfortunately, at the present moment they’re just not best at conveying the same kinds of things that actors convey on a real-life stage. Taking advantage of the particular expressive capabilities of a virtual world, however — a place where broad brushstrokes and unreal constructs seem to have the most impact — could be really interesting.
The situation is analagous to the Second Life architecture scene. A while back, Second Life Herald freelancer Budka Groshomme wrote, “There are some nice buildings, but most are architectural disasters; little more than decorated copies of something that wouldn’t even be interesting in RL.” Where Second Life seems to excel is in allowing for the creation of things that are somehow more than real. The visual and plastic arts are already making cool strides in this area in Second Life. It will be interesting to see whether residents take advantage of this in the theatrical arena as well going forward.
Feeds
i thought an obvious idea for a play in second life would be romeo and juliet, second life style. Meaning, there is a group name montegue, which has a member named romeo, who falls for another character named juliet. Instead of faking his death, his fakes his banning, juliet finds out and quits, Romeo finds out she quit and quits as well. You could adapt plenty of RL plays to have Second Life as not just the stage, but the setting as well.
MrHackman makes me think of prok’s comments about how Second Life itself is the “immersion” rather than a particular environment/experience within… so the rich fabric of Second Life is itself the play… “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
there certainly is drama enough for all in Second Life!
I’m glad you made what seems a realistic call on this Forseti, though I didn’t get to see this play put on last night with much fanfare and was assured by Reuben that there really was expressiveness in the avatars through animations and autonomous animations at that — I’d have to see.
Somewhere on one of these forums (so many now it’s hard to keep track) someone took to task a resident who commissioned them as an artist to make a texture and build for them, but who then couldn’t communicate what they wanted and seemed disappointed and unable to explain their problem. She noted that the customer was trying to reproduce within SL some sense of emotional excitement they had experienced in RL without being able to capture what it was even in RL such as to reproduce the same effect it had on them in SL.
Machinima just never works for me, and seems very wooden and hokey in ways that not even Gumby and Pokey, who are pretty damn expressive, seem like, and I always try to figure out “why,” because I think it’s important to develop this genre (and Nylon is very good in pushing its limits). I look at my avatar and my view on the world, and wonder what about it just can’t be conveyed. I find it endlessly interesting. It never gets boring for me. But of course someone else following it might be bored silly. So somehow, it *is* about the immersiveness of your own Second Life itself, and it’s paths and interactions and passtimes and labours, and what they mean to you. If it didn’t have meaning to me personally, it would be dull. So there is some inner faculty of the spirit or heart that is imbued in the avatar (Will Wright called it “investing the toy with consciousness but it’s much more than that), that brings about an emotional interface that is easy to experience at that interface, but well nigh impossible to convey to others except those drawn into your sphere in an intimate romantic relationship, perhaps, or in some other type of intensive group interaction, or even an episode of fighting a griefer.
In the Sims Online, there was a little group of us who used to do a show called Living Soap Opera. We convened at Flamingo Court on certain nights with ourselves and our alts and we enacted the soap opera of my long-running comic/graphic novel serial by the same name. We invited people over, and they could either decide to become one of the characters, or they could sit passively by the pool and not interact.
With TSO we had much greater capacity for acting, odd as it may seem, because we could log on as many as 5 different alt accounts at once and puppeteer them realistically. Furthermore, their little actions like “comfort” — the patting on the shoulder — could be enormously moving in a collective or individual way in that context, even in that 2-d world so dull by SL contrast.
In SL, when I actually try to pan out and view with more of a mind’s eye any scene happening, I find it hard to figure out where to focus. The avatar’s face is a nothing. If they are in one of those fake posey chairs giving them fake humanoid movements like tapping their feet or brushing their hair back, they look like they’re trapped in a machine. So animations like dancing make them more natural, but it’s hard to get them really interesting. So I find myself taking screenshots of evocative little objects or big pieces of the world that talk, like the “absinthe fairy” discarded on the steps of the mall; the little diver in the lobster tank at Prok’s Seafood; a giant space ship somebody has parked incongruously on a lawn. So it seems a world more made for expression through photography, and people collect and trade their photographs to a great extent.
Yet the desire to having moving pictures is intense. I really wish these Linden alts like Buhbuhcuh would teach more of a guerilla kind of film-making that would have a very stripped down and easy way of covering the world to do both spot news and advertising, so that resident-based independent TV could get started. But that’s not in their interests — they want to work on mannered, highly-fabricated production-level movies that they can use not only to sell SL, but sell, say, Nissan in SL.
I still have hopes for theater, but I guess I’m thinking as with TSO that improv or tv-type soap operas are more adaptable to the genre just because the stilted first-life plays can’t stand up to typing, lag, and lack of facial expression and voice. In TSO, a brave fellow put on “Waiting for Godot” by having the avatars moving with TSO animiations and costuming on a stage, but he also had the actors speak on Internet radio timed to work with the play.
[…] Recursive Update: 3pointD posted a link and Prokofy had an interesting response in the comments section over there. […]
We are having a lot of fun, which to me is the real point. Our next foray into the hilarious world of show biz is vaudeville/music hall. I am imagining short acts with things like magic acts, acrobats, trained tinies, comedy schtick, synchronised knitting, etc. It seems to me that SL is superbly well suited to this - I can see a magic act gone wrong, or an alley-oop tower of avatar acrobats in my mind’s eye and it makes me laugh. Anyone who wants to make up a goofy act should join in - for god’s sake - LET’S HAVE FUN.
Here’s a review I did of the actual play (not the technicalities so much) for Slatenight:
http://www.slatenight.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75&Itemid=40