Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms(metafilter.com) |
Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms(metafilter.com) |
I was devastated to find the group's website is gone and the game's page no longer on the internet. For those of you who want to experience it I've got it on my server here: http://data.chrisnorstrom.com/hosting/kkrieger-beta.zip. They were probably the best group out there. Looks like they closed up show because their site theprodukt is closed for good.
I knew a really good Demoscene coder, and he introduced the culture to me. He worked on synthetic procedurally generated voices (which is really hard). But the problem is that the bar to entry is extremely high because it's all algorithms and the culture is all about fun, not profit. So the community stays small. Why spend months making lights and patterns react to music in a 64kb file when you can make a 200mb game or animated and sell it. The means do not justify the ends, thus most people will never know the awesomeness of demoscene.
[1] http://www.farb-rausch.de/ [2] http://www.farb-rausch.de/prod.py?which=114
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843427
also a thread on Memon releasing the sources to Demopaja
You guys should watch this movie! http://molemanfilm.com/about-moleman/about-moleman-2/
It's very good, and also on Youtube. It'll tell you all about the demoscene! you'll enjoy it!
-mkC/3LN: The clumsiest ever
Note: This post used to have a lot of redundancy inside of it, but that's gone now!
http://capped.tv - recordings of demos
http://pouet.net - combination forum and demo repository
in fact, there's plenty of active demosceners here on HN. -waves!-
Is it true what you said in the other thread, all the Dutch sceners are unemployed? :) Something in the drinking water at Bizarre, perhaps? :)
My releases: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=343 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=291 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=332 http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=333 (You might need one of those DOSbox tools to get sound or to run at all though. They were targeted at Win98/2k, Meuk completely stopped working with XP)
Still great learning experience for a kid.
But yeah it was nothing like a startup because there were no responsibilities or requirements, everyone just did whatever they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted, and if it gelled into a demo, then great. It was all about exploring shared interests and having fun.
On a technical level, demos are highly impressive and how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene to create the works that they do is ingenious, but it doesn't make the resulting product interesting from an artistic viewpoint.
For me at least, the glaring weakness is the lack of narrative - there's no stories being told, there's nothing that engages or challenges the viewer. They're akin to videos that show off the features of a game engine where they engender the "that's pretty" reaction, but little else.
To my mind, this is caused by two things - primarily, it's a side effect of the restrictions imposed by the artform. With the limitations of the scene in play, there simply might not exist the scope to create enough content for an engaging narrative structure to be based around and procedural generation only takes you so far when it comes to creating assets in a resource limited environment.
Secondly, I'd argue that the types of people who are primarily interested in creating narrative are going to gravitate to different creative areas - creating short films, or animations for example. As a result, the demoscene is likely to be made up of people who mostly interesting in the question of how pretty the output is, rather than how interesting it is. This is of course also related to the fact that people who 'grew up' in the scene are likely to have a relatively narrow view of what the scene looks like and are unlikely to buck that trend and break out into doing something completely different.
The above is naturally just my two euroyencent of course.
I don't think demos will ever have a wide mass-appeal, even while being one of the most demanding and beautiful of art-forms (in my opinion).
Sell it, and it wouldn't be "for the sake of awesomeness" anymore. And it'd be less fun.
There've been a small number of paid demoscene projects at some points, such as Linger in Shadows by Plastic (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50170), but even they were simply paid for the project by Sony, they didn't market and commercialize the demo themselves.
I guess it's simply that for most demosceners, once you not just doing it for fun anymore, it isn't really much fun anymore.
http://www.49games.de/ was the 'commercial' arm of Farbrausch (most Farbrausch members worked there) and they got bought by the german game developing company Bigpoint: http://bigpoint.net/2011/09/bigpoint-takes-over-the-entire-d...
Here's Kebby (FR) talking a bit about the demoscene at MIT: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17875473
The other thing demos are missing is an idea. Most media go through a phase where technique is paramount (in music, the virtuosos, in most visual art, loosely the "realists"), but the majority of fine art must address an important theme outside of the work itself to be interesting. Demos exist for themselves, they don't have any higher purpose. Games, in a small way, do, which may also account for their success so far.
It's pretty telling that the scene adapted to the increased hardware by imposing their own limitations instead of anything-goes. If we can't be wowed by what they do on limited hardware, we have to be wowed by what they can do under their own very harsh limitations.
But when hardware stopped begin crap, when you started getting hardware accelerated graphics, when you could do mp3 playback in realtime, it got too easy to make something pretty, and less awesome.
If the demo scene had been about making pretty things, they would have just continued using the new hardware, but since the most important thing has been overcoming difficulties, making something pretty DESPITE the limitations, making something awesome, you know they value the challenge most.
And that is hard to communicate to regular people, because they can only value the prettiness of a demo, and that limits the popularity of it.
http://www.4players.de/4sceners.php/dispbericht/-/5157/0/ind...
So the issue is distribution, if you can't put it to friends device without jumping through hoops, it gains less interest. I haven't followed android-scene that much, but I believe there are at least some ports of demos available. There the hoops are in supporting different kind of devices.
But asking for money? Not in the spirit of scene, how are you gonna ‘show off’ your mad skills if you are gonna ask for money? :)
As far as non-interactive demo-style stuff, markets pop up occasionally for procedural/generative art, which is related, though again with less focus on compactness (except when necessary). There was a market for screensavers in the 90s, for example, and some had pretty involved procedural stuff going on. Today there are a handful of mobile apps doing generative graphics, e.g. http://superfiretruck.com/iteration/. I think you could probably sell a demoscene production or demo-pack on Android.
I think your question is, will someone pay money for a pure off the wall demo - short answer is no.
long answer is they kinda have for a while, futuremark was the classic commercialized demo. difference tho is, it had a utility besides the eye candy.