Second Life is getting a lot of buzz these days as the medium through which people will interact and perhaps get their entertainment in the future. Political candidates have offices and give speeches there. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will give the opening concert of their season there next month motivated by the desire to be the first to do so.

But I heard something today that is motivating me to keep my eyes and ears open for some other alternatives. A student who has had a long association with the theatre came in today and announced she was going to move to Spokane, WA in January to work for Cyan Worlds, creators of the Myst games.

She has been playing Myst Online for sometime now and decided she was going to visit the company this summer. She apparently told them she was coming, when she got there she announced she was going to work for them. Judging from the number of pictures she got with the founder and other employees, they did nothing to dissuade her ambitions. (It also doesn’t hurt that they are advertising for the job she wants.)

I was mostly amused as she talked about her visit. (“The woman in this picture doesn’t know it yet, but she is going to hire me.”) But my ears really perked up when she mentioned that the reason she liked the game was that it was like theatre and performance art. Every month a new chapter in the story is introduced by the game staff to drive the plot forward similar to a TV series. In the interim, the players work together to perform tasks and solve the puzzles for which the Myst games are famous.

I won’t pretend to know much more about the game beyond what I have read online. A couple things I did come across got me thinking that the dynamics of the game might have some lessons for the future of performing arts.

First of all, while players will have the ability to influence the storyline and submit created content, the game administration still retains control of how things proceed. This is in contrast with games like World of Warcraft where there is almost no attention paid to the plot. Second Life allows people a great deal of control over the environment to the point where people are developing and selling real estate in the virtual world. However, that control also equates to the ability to vandalize and destroy property which has been purchased in real dollars at some point in the process.

User created content may be all the rage, but as Andrew Taylor pointed out back in May, there are a lot more people are watching the content rather than creating it. At this point there is still a large majority who want to see well made content (or at least videos of people making fools of themselves) and don’t necessarily crave a high degree of control from the experience.

Live performance in the future may come to mean interacting with virtual avatars of performers. Acting may regress a little. Since appearance will be a function of good design and rendering, the most highly paid actors might be those who have good voices and improvisation/acting skills necessary to interact with people rather than those who look good.

It would be a sort of reversal of the emergence of talking films where people who looked good but had bad speaking voices found themselves out of a job. You have to look no further than Tony Jay who wasn’t a bad looking guy but had a gorgeous voice. He got a lot more work as a voice over artist for cartoons and video games than for his physical presence so it is not tough to see that the real money for performance may soon be in having a good voice and a sense of drama.