pouët.net

:(

The delusions in this thread are kinda shocking. Gargaj is on the money.

This is one of those (repeated) statements that has an air of deep insight to it, but is just shallow nonsense.

Yes — who says it matters. When people who don’t make shit say it, you’re free to care less about it. When the people who make shit say it, you should probably take it in.

SHOTS FIRED!

For as long as I keep making shit, I also prefer making up my own mind :)

Did it ever occur to you, that different people can have different perspectives upon what 'the scene' is about?

And while you're at it, please also define 'dead'. To me, 'dead' means: ceased to exist.

In my opinion the scene is a rather narrow-minded sandbox for experimentations and some eventually grow out of it.

the inviting attitude of some of the same handful of people is truly inspiring!

scenes grow and then disapepar or merge with other ones.

If you want that in different words: the more you'll fuck around – pardon my french – with the livecoding lots, the more you'll get homo-sapiens-sed out of it.
Or we'll end up with tons of 4k prods with one coder only and a snare that sounds like a fart.
Once every 2 years you'll get "that prod" for the old fucks, amazing… few youngsters coming in here to gain knowledge and sell that to companies later, eventually?

But all in all, it's not really the scene we remember from two decades ago, right? Which was not exactly entirely like 30 years ago. How do you call that when you're feeling like a youngster of a scene but you just turned 41 (not kidding, I turned 41 today)

uuuuh, I turned 41 and I did not pay a single drink at the pub. s/disapepar/disappear

Happy birthday!

How do you remember it?

I remember a party being a room full of people gathering together for the joy of sharing their creations. Who learn from each other. And grow themselves a little over the course.

And I fail to see how that changed. Other than nowadays I talk to them. And call many of them 'friends'.

I think that what Gargaj and others have said is that the problem is that… it's still mostly the same people.

(and thank you!)

I run into new faces on every party I've been to during the last years. And I've been to plenty. Of course the biggest part is familiar faces. How is that different from eg clubs or other subcultures? And what makes that a bad thing? Or renders it 'dead'?

I've seen my own hometown going dead the same, yeah yeah, new faces, the spirit is not the same; it's different and it will evolve differently, it always does.

(I Mean, don't forget I always put some balls into different scenes, played my music locally, been there done that, it's always the same, stuff grow and evolve and change – if they are lucky – it's a cycle)

heh I wish to meet some OLDER people in the scene that have disappeared, to pay my respects and tell them how much it meant to me too watch their creations in early 90s!

It's not the same gold rush with real-time graphics as before.
At first, every year we had 2x faster CPU. Then, GPUs appeared, and every year was also a breakthrough, fixed pipeline, programmable pipeline, incremental improvements in shader models, compute shaders, finally Vulkan. It was more realistic for small group or even individual to pull some new impressive effects. There are still many interesting tricks to discover, but they are not immediately apparent.

So now, it seems to be more about art, for which real-time medium is not that potent maybe? See comments on otherwise very cool new ASD demo. I disagree with them, but for pure visual consumption it could have been just a 4k 60fps video. To me the choice of medium is still impressive, as I can appreciate carefully crafted code behind, but I guess most people don't care? Real-time cutscenes in games looks better anyway.

Livecoding was exciting for a while, but there is so much you can do with raymarching.

And lastly, young people now are more focused on emerging stuff, like AI, that will potentially bring them jobs in the future (see large community in sites like https://huggingface.co).

But yeah, as Gargaj says, the demoscene will be alive as long as all the old-timers are ;)
So why cry about it, let's just enjoy while it lasts.

What's the spirit for you? How do you evaluate that? I'm really curious. When did you attend the last demoparty?

The way I perceive it, the thing that changed the most are the expectations of individuals.

At the same time, I think about the french youngsters winning the newcomer award at Evoke. Totally flabbergasted by the appreciation of receiving instant, positive feedback.

I'm very aware by now that my perspective on life seems to be different from most. And maybe that's why I find this conversation alienating in parts. Because I don't find a rational angle from which to process it.

Same!

On the other side, last year I noticed how much my perception of skewed time played tricks on me. When I realized I just can't keep up partying with all the folks who are 10 years younger than me.

OK. I've given it some thought since yesterday, as I really wanted to provide a counterpoint for some of the more negative comments written here. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that Gargaj and Gloom are absolutely right, and any counterpoint I could provide would be bullshit. It was bullshit yesterday, and as such, I rescind my own toxically positive drivel from yesterday.

I don't have to look any further than myself for an example.

I was invited to contribute to the AssemblyTV Megademo and I barely participated in it. I could have done a lot more, but at the very least, I should have been honest with myself and with ps that I just don't have the love for it anymore. Sorry, ps. Glad you and the crew got it done gloriously without me helping much.

We just had an Assembly and an Evoke, and I've seen a combined total of one demo from the both these parties. Even that demo I only watched because I saw people touting it as the best demo in decades. Maybe it would respark something that I can't bring myself to admit has fizzled out in the first place?

The next Jumalauta party is just around the corner, and that one I am really looking forward to, because it's a nice weekend together with some old friends. Maybe that will rekindle some passion for the thing that brought us friends together in the first place. Maybe it won't. Maybe my stint as a demo coder was a brief flash and now I'm back to being mostly passive. Back to visiting small parties organized by good friends. Until those friends, too, get tired of organizing them, with no one there to pick up the torch.

Maybe the most catastrophic damage done by decades of people claiming that AGA or 3D acceleration or Unity is killing the demoscene is that we can't look at the waning of our community without thinking it's just the same alarmist nonsense we heard and laughed at countless times before.

Or maybe there is something just at the edges of the bubble that we can't quite see. I do wish more of my Helsinki scene friends would go to Instanssi, as on the scale of Finland, the Jyväskylä scene is the brightest representation of hope for a future there is. They have a thing all of their own there, with their own perspective into what a demo party is, and it's beautiful. They got a Revision satellite done. We here in the greater metropolitan circle jerk managed no such thing.

Of course, even the young blood in Jyväskylä is not that young anymore. Maybe they're just the last gasp.

Maybe we are just a couple of years away from the last great party, the last great compo, the last great demo. Maybe we're going to be assimilated into something else, like the livecoding scene already mentioned. Or maybe we'll just vanish.

And that's ok. That's life. Death is life.

Yeah, I had the same yesterday. Gargaj is absolutely right that a lot of things we take for granted are actually in the hands of only a few people that actually maintain these.

We tend to happily look past it saying 'see how many newcomers Evoke had' but how many of these newcomers stick around and take on the boring things. we even did a Zine Radio Show episode how the basis of all online demoscene presence is basically about three people.

Tbh I think it's a bit less gloomy than gargaj and gloom made it out to be, we have some new people stick around, become staples, take on ownership, but overall, it is incredibly naïve to think everything is going strong.

We're incredibly lucky to have people actually wanting to organize parties, host website, maintain forums, discords and socials, and most importantly, make big productions, sacrifice time that is already so incredibly rare the older we get.

But on the other hand, several of the people who worked on it (including myself) were relative newcomers who were super excited to be working on the project.

TIC-80 is a great example of something that's made the scene more accessible and brought new people in. I get that to some people (Gargaj!) it doesn't count and it's cheating or whatever, but the scene can be different things to different people. In my case, fantasy consoles and sizecoding were a gateway to getting actively involved in the scene, joining a group and now doing stuff on other platforms.

You need to take a step back. It's great to have websites and forums and streams and all this stuff, but it's not needed. It all breaks down to just two things: Demos and parties. One person is enough to make a demo, and just two people with this interest form a party. And quickly the wish arises to have a meeting of three or forty. So demoscene is totally safe for at least another 30 years. And when its time is over, let it RIP. And thanks to Unesco it may then become something like opera, including tax money funnelled to some AI generated parties in metaverse, with max headroom and some bigwigs commenting on its cultural significance. :-)

the fact the scene is still alive is also the reason why it does not evolve into something else.

think of it like boomers and real estate.