Contemplating a revival of Comedy Night

Once upon a time in the Myst/Uru community my group The Guild Of Slackers had a community thing called Comedy Night. In those days The Guild Of Comedy would dress up as the comedians and perform on a stage in the Guild Of Comedy Neighborhood (or The Blue Neighborhood if the act was rated 18+) and the person presenting the comedy audio would dress as the comedian. It stopped gaining interest during the first run of Myst Online. I’ve been stewing on this for well over a month now. I want to revive it, but not in MOULa.

Why? I’ve been in there a few times, and between the forums and the people who play in game themselves I doubt there would be much interest. That and quite a few people these days including myself are annoyed with the ancient voice chat system. We could stream it on a shoutcast server but it wouldn’t be as immersive, plus there would be those old sticks in the mud who refuse to listen to streams because you know… An audio feature from the early turn of the century is sooooo much more immersive than Speex or Opus codecs that are used in modern voice chat programs like Mumble, Vent, etc.

So where would I want to hold this? In the Garry’s Mod cinema gamemode.

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I’ve been watching my server for awhile now, and people have been gathering in there to watch all sorts of things. Sometimes it’s some pretty stupid stuff, but I’ve seen some people come in and have anime marathons (the latest one was a Deadman Wonderland), dance parties and one of my regulars held a movie night! So why not have a comedy night? There are lots of full comedy videos on YouTube, and YouTube is supported in the gamemode.

Of course you would have to own a copy of gmod to get on the server, but the map that we use doesn’t require any assets from other source games. At the very least they would need to have the cinema map and gamemode, and optionally download any playermodels they would want from our workshop collection. Then bam. Comedy Night in a nutshell. I don’t expect people to buy the game JUST to join in on this. But for now this seems like the best way to hold an event.

Due to my work schedule it won’t always be on the same day and might not even happen every week. But once I can get people to agree on one solid day and time we can have a few laughs.