pouët.net

RE:

Gloom
"I'd rather argue that lack of new people is the symptom, not the cause. The problem lies in identifying WHY new people (and I don't mean young, just NEW) aren't interested in creating demos themselves."

I wonder if it *is* lack of interest . . . A guess at answers - 1) daunted by the history 2) lack some skills \ try to go it alone 3) lack of patience and stick-to-itness?


RE:

kb
1) "That's not even true. In the 80s most people only used their C64s and Amigas for playing games. The nerdy and creative types have always been few and far between if you count in the general population and I wouldn't think there are less of them nowadays"

YES! I was thinking similar things but wasn't in the scene then so wasn't confident to say that. That said, I wonder if lower barriers to creating in less technical ways (e.g. the boom in stop motion animations on YouTube and such) might have something to do with it though? I mean, in the '80s I was playing with Hypercard and Paintworks Plus, in the 90s with Painter and ResEdit and some crap sound editing program called SoundFX, but I didn't know anything about the scene and I think I might have been daunted if I did. I get the sense there are even easier creation tools now, and different outlets like YouTube and such.

Also -- out on a limb here, and going to say this clumsily-- perhaps the way that the online population is more diverse and disperse, technical people are less likely to stumble across the scene than they perhaps used to be, when "online" was a limited number of BBSes, a back when going "online" at all meant a certain level of technical knowledge, and half of Comdex knew what Second Reality was, for example. When I show the scene to guys my age (I somehow rarely get to share it with women, sigh) they all know Second Reality and think the scene ended there -- because the "world" was small enough then that everyone knew about it.

I also wonder if the kinds of work schedules technical people have now in Europe as well as the States (where I get the sense this was always true) make it harder to produce, in terms of contractual garbage where they try to own your brain, and in terms of crazy work hours and expectations? Could this have an effect?

kb
2) "Smash got it right in this regard - we have to turn that self imposed limitation into a strength. The hard part is getting all that knowledge and having the amounts of creativity it takes to play that strength. But now and then it's possible. :)"

It strikes me that doing case studies of how to approach demomaking might help new folks. I do suspect that's what Bents trying to do with DisplayHack, but he can speak for himself of course.

I remember similar arguments in the 90s - amiga people saying the PC wasn't a real computer but just a business tool for running spreadsheets. If people move to the iPad or whatever it's just a new platform in a long series of new platforms.

As to why there's less young people in the scene now, maybe it's natural?



Most people don't want to learn to code to get decent results when there's some app that does a great job already. Younger people are going to be creating a lot more stuff with these apps rather than coding it like in the old days.

But... that's not a big problem. Anyone who's used serious creative tools for a while knows that eventually you start hitting the limits of the software, and you get more and more into scripting and such. That leads into learning to code so you can write plugins, which leads to... demo skills. This is how I learned to code pretty much and I know quite a few others who took the same path. It takes some years to happen, and by the time you're qualified to be a demo coder you're likely in your 30s.

On the plus side, we get better demos and less scene drama :D

I'm sorry, but that's rubbish. :) Or, it depends on how you define both "creative things" and "computers", and if you insist on using "percentages" as a method of measuring. CLEARLY, there are way more people doing creative things with computers (and computer-like devices, like tablets, mobile phones, Arduino-kits etc.) now than in 1990. Of that there can be no question at all. The problem is: how to encourage people to make the leap from being a slightly passive person to take an active role?

I guess my opinion comes down to that we can't really enforce a strict set of rules as to what constitutes demoscene activity any longer -- we have to think broader and accept and welcome change. That's not to say we can't keep going with everything we still enjoy, but that we'll ALSO have to allow new forms of demoscene activity, and not shun those who practice it into the cold.

he hit it.

look, theres shitloads of people on the internet coding graphics & effects for fun - more than ever in fact. the people with the skills and interest in the general area are out there. go visit fractalforums or ompf.org or kinect hacks or many others like them and check it out. it's not a problem of a lack of people with skills. _they exist_. and many of them know about the demoscene already.

the question is why they arent interested in making demos.

imo the big reason for this is that the output of the scene just doesnt interest them anymore.
10-20 years ago the major scene output was demos on the high end of the major consumer platform of the time (amiga, pc dos, pc windows). the mainstream can "get" it - "it's like a game but cooler". it wouldnt look out of place next to other videos on a youtube playlist (if that existed back then). demos were aspirational. attracting the mainstream gave us a diversity of people interested- artsts, designers, musicians - which in turn added a more design-lead touch to demos, making them appeal to the mainstream even more. that diversity was a _good thing_.

nowadays, it seems the balance has shifted much more in favour of a freakshow of more random platforms - oldschool, homebuilt, tiny intros (4k), tiny tiny intros (128 bytes).. where to be interested in the results you basically have to be a hacker (or a nostalgic). which means the people joining the scene tend to be .. hackers (or nostalgics).

modern pc prods have dropped in number and quality and rarely target the high end - as someone said on here, a lot of pc demos in 2011 look like the last 10 years never happened. the lack of diverse audience has lead to a drop off in artists and designers getting invovled, which has made demos a lot more coder-centric. (an artist's involvement in a demo in 2011 stood out a mile.)

if you want to know why those people arent joining the scene anymore, its cos demos just arent interesting enough to them.

could someone please make a graph over the number of visitors at demoparties for the last 20 years?

rudi: anyone can make such a graph if the numbers exist, but they don't. Also, it's not an interesting metric, seeing as we can already count the amount of parties as an indication of party-attending-willingness. If there is no interest in going to parties, there wouldn't be any, hence your request is statistically irrelevant.

smash: I think you're pretty much spot on. Now, the question is: can we, the demoscene as a whole -- or at least the people who actively participate and have an opportunity to affect people -- start to shift the discussion away from "boo hoo" to "let's think - what can we do to change this?"

what smash said but also STOP THE BORING DUBSTEPISH-GOATRANCE-GLITCH-MUSIC IN DEMOS BUT ADD MORE PANFLUTES BECAUSE THIS AINT 2002 ANYMORE!

Yeah, plenty of good words in this thread, but now it's time for action :)

that all said, the internet is a whole new audience for that; when i went to notacon a few years back, everyone knew of lft, and barely anyone has heard of fairlight.
so yes, perhaps some people started running for an audience that isn't there while leaving the interested behind.

I am pretty much for looking around for other audience.

Why don't we then accept the trend and create "realtime *interactive*" demo category? Then the scene.org could give the "year best interactive demo" price for the first place and it would be much easier to author to send it then to SIGGRAPH or if there is anyone close to SIGGRAPH organizers - maybe it could be even awarded with acceptance here by definition?

im not sure what you mean by that its not being relevant at all. the number of people attending demoparties is a good measure of how many people who might/was and is interested in the demoscene for the last 20 years. but i agree with you that getting a number like that is hard. however if a graph like that showed an rising curve, i wouldn't count on the demoscene dying because there would be enough interest in it. the cause would then be people being to lazy producing demos.

measuring only the amount of parties there would be an error because of the difference between small and big parties: hundred versus one thousand attendants for example.

gloom: all we can do, and all we ever could do, is make cool stuff and try and pitch it at the right audience.

gargaj: altho that was a hacker conference, so i guess you proved my point. :)

im with maq tho. interactive installations, kinect hacking, this stuff is huge right now. tap it.

smash: that's hilarious, you complain about the scene becoming a freakshow and losing focus from mainline demos, then you suggest doing "interactive installations" - what?

rudi: the massive variance in party size is also a reason why 'number of visitors' is a useless measure. Is Dreamhack a demo party? It grows massively every year, and probably pushes up the average quite a lot, but does that tell us anything about trends in the demoscene? Not really.

gasman: no i was not talking about dreamhack nor the gathering. i was talking about pure demoscene parties. sorry i didnt mention that. yea. of course i know it doesnt tell anything about the trends. its just specifically a meassure to show the amount of people being at parties. i thought that would be of interest.

said in another way: if you're at a demoparty, you probably wouldnt be there if you had no interrest in it.

Gargaj: its as good an idea as any (or none) :)

some wouldnt be able to go to them for different reasons of course: economic, lack of time, being home with kids, vacation etc. but a graph like that would give an hint of the amount of people _at_ parties. thats just all, nothing more fancier than that. hehe

ok, here's one idea. Limit a democompo time limit to 2 minutes to encourage smaller productions and make the idea of making a demo less daunting.

trailer-demos!

Gargaj: Smash do this and you do this

who do you think can attract most ppl to the demo scene?

But then people that use ""unity"" will make stuff and we all know that's inferior to our standards. Not to mention ""machinima"".

let's just size code stupid shit until everybody forgets us.

(I'm not bitter, really, but face it people, things change and i'm with smash that the scene now attracts way more nostalgics and hackers and less people interested into doing general "creative things" on computers. I know several people that actually "left" the demoscene because they felt it was strangling in it's 'must stay the same' way and wasn't open enough for the stuff they were doing)