Non-scener's confusion about the scene
category: general [glöplog]
Dubmood, is this the last stand of your line of reasoning? Careful, overhelming evidence might bite you into your nose. :-)
Yadda yadda yadda. Someone likes arguing on the internet. Don't bite!
Had demos stayed at the level where the demos of 8-bit computers were during the 1980s, there wouldn't be so much to remember. Some might perhaps say, there wouldn't have been the demoscene as a separate domain.
One important question might be: was there any peculiar factors that led to the birth of first classic demos on the 16-bit machines or was it just the continuation of the linear process of learning and innovating that had started with C64 and then went on in the 16-bit domain?
One important question might be: was there any peculiar factors that led to the birth of first classic demos on the 16-bit machines or was it just the continuation of the linear process of learning and innovating that had started with C64 and then went on in the 16-bit domain?
Maybe it's not the best idea in the world to break my 24-y-spree of not getting involved in useless dramas in here, but #yolo.
So hi y'all. Lemme share some perspective as someone moderately involved in an actual research (1 soon-to-be-published paper), but also regular civilian writing (1 album about the demoscene), and a successful unesco application for which I went through many aspects of demoscene with various academia/govt people proving we're actually a culture.
Any statistical regression leaves some data points away from the regression line, sometimes far away, yet those points can still support the general trend and not be outliers. Everyone's experience might be different, that's why in academia in general they usually don't find to be a good practice when people involved in something start to investigate it. It is usually hard not to be biased by one's experience and to allow for sometimes dramatically different perspectives.
Having said that, there is a ton of evidence -- not necessarily published as proper academic papers, but with some confidence that some proper journalism was done there -- from interviews with people to justify linking beginnings of demoscene with cracking. There is some evidence to support idea that demoscene evolved because of 1/ increased competition within cracking scene, where usual fields of competition became too hard, like time-to-crack, because of good penetration of supply-chain, cracks often were released prior to game itself, cracker scene started to compete on visuals as well, which in time became more important for some, 2/ heavy police raids resulted in many crackers doing some proper jail time, made others think twice if that's really worth it, or maybe visuals are great way to compete too.
It's one thing to observe a living phenomenon from start, while it evolves, especially if you're a part of it, and decide what is the most important characteristic that makes it "the it". On the other hand, looking backwards if we want to describe -- for unesco purposes for example -- what makes demoscene unique and worthy calling a culture, what tells apart demoscene from cracking scene, grafitti scene, AAA games that push hardware to the limits, or even just a boring plain-ol computer art or NFTs or what-have-you.
it's same for any historic retrospective, the eras of actient egypt were not clear-cut lines either, but you need to draw the line somewhere. To havoc's comment, each person can have a different view. Like even in academia, people argue on dates all the time wrt stuff like the abovementioned acient egypt era's.
For us, me personally, this line was a first demoparty in poland in 91. Were there proper demoscene prods in PL before? Sure they were. A fameous Quartet group did few. They even held a "party" that was couple friends from the block crashing at ones' apartment. Was there a competition aspect? No, they just watched some demos. It is still being referred to in some scrollers as party. But the competition aspect (and the fact that productions are really done with this competition in mind, that are rarely released outside of the compo context) is what tells us apart in my humble opinion, but also in opinion of other people from different fields that were reviewing and deciding on the unesco application.
So hi y'all. Lemme share some perspective as someone moderately involved in an actual research (1 soon-to-be-published paper), but also regular civilian writing (1 album about the demoscene), and a successful unesco application for which I went through many aspects of demoscene with various academia/govt people proving we're actually a culture.
Any statistical regression leaves some data points away from the regression line, sometimes far away, yet those points can still support the general trend and not be outliers. Everyone's experience might be different, that's why in academia in general they usually don't find to be a good practice when people involved in something start to investigate it. It is usually hard not to be biased by one's experience and to allow for sometimes dramatically different perspectives.
Having said that, there is a ton of evidence -- not necessarily published as proper academic papers, but with some confidence that some proper journalism was done there -- from interviews with people to justify linking beginnings of demoscene with cracking. There is some evidence to support idea that demoscene evolved because of 1/ increased competition within cracking scene, where usual fields of competition became too hard, like time-to-crack, because of good penetration of supply-chain, cracks often were released prior to game itself, cracker scene started to compete on visuals as well, which in time became more important for some, 2/ heavy police raids resulted in many crackers doing some proper jail time, made others think twice if that's really worth it, or maybe visuals are great way to compete too.
It's one thing to observe a living phenomenon from start, while it evolves, especially if you're a part of it, and decide what is the most important characteristic that makes it "the it". On the other hand, looking backwards if we want to describe -- for unesco purposes for example -- what makes demoscene unique and worthy calling a culture, what tells apart demoscene from cracking scene, grafitti scene, AAA games that push hardware to the limits, or even just a boring plain-ol computer art or NFTs or what-have-you.
it's same for any historic retrospective, the eras of actient egypt were not clear-cut lines either, but you need to draw the line somewhere. To havoc's comment, each person can have a different view. Like even in academia, people argue on dates all the time wrt stuff like the abovementioned acient egypt era's.
For us, me personally, this line was a first demoparty in poland in 91. Were there proper demoscene prods in PL before? Sure they were. A fameous Quartet group did few. They even held a "party" that was couple friends from the block crashing at ones' apartment. Was there a competition aspect? No, they just watched some demos. It is still being referred to in some scrollers as party. But the competition aspect (and the fact that productions are really done with this competition in mind, that are rarely released outside of the compo context) is what tells us apart in my humble opinion, but also in opinion of other people from different fields that were reviewing and deciding on the unesco application.
@angelo: Thank you.
So the competition aspect makes the demoscene unique or distinct if I got it right.
For me the first thought is that main demoscene products itself are unique. Like purposefully sizelimited visual coding, demos for commercially obsolete computers etc. They're not necessarily totally unique phenomena but especially in this kind of organized form giving an arena for them.
For me the first thought is that main demoscene products itself are unique. Like purposefully sizelimited visual coding, demos for commercially obsolete computers etc. They're not necessarily totally unique phenomena but especially in this kind of organized form giving an arena for them.
Establishing self-imposed limits is not a new concept by any means. There's been many instances in various art fields of people/groups doing that (e.g. Dogma95, OuLIpO, etc).
Purposefully sizelimited visual coding is pretty modern. Making demos for commercially obsolete computers is not the case for late 80's either. Like I remember my early demoscene, each year there was a more powerful compo-machine which people tried to take adventage of. Of course this is not 100% true, demoscene in PL in late 80's started mainly on Atari, which was by that time commercially obsolete, but it was not self-imposed limitation, but US-imposed COCOMO export control.
The way I see it, the limits in the beginnings were imposed by the reality. Self-imposed limits -- like size, old hardware, or just use a portion of hardware (shaders) came later. Of course the act of pushing the limits whatever they might be is a very important piece of demoscene identity, and the real-time aspect too.
Purposefully sizelimited visual coding is pretty modern. Making demos for commercially obsolete computers is not the case for late 80's either. Like I remember my early demoscene, each year there was a more powerful compo-machine which people tried to take adventage of. Of course this is not 100% true, demoscene in PL in late 80's started mainly on Atari, which was by that time commercially obsolete, but it was not self-imposed limitation, but US-imposed COCOMO export control.
The way I see it, the limits in the beginnings were imposed by the reality. Self-imposed limits -- like size, old hardware, or just use a portion of hardware (shaders) came later. Of course the act of pushing the limits whatever they might be is a very important piece of demoscene identity, and the real-time aspect too.
fwiw, I am really not trying to downplay limitations, I've actually even organized a SIGGRAPH workshop around this very concept 3 years ago, which was meant to be released by ACM to the public, but obviously they didn't live up to the promise... shame. But many sceners way better than me did say a lot of clever and insightful things I couldn't agree with more.
@angelo: full ack
Whatever demos were in the 1980s and early 1990s, the demoscene (or the wider "scene") was basically the only domain where they were produced (they didn't make things like "Arte" or "Second Reality" elsewhere, did they?). The same is true about demos made in today's demoscene (...or is it actually true of newschool limitless demos made with tools, I'm not sure). While the content has changed during the years, my intuition is that the content has been rather unique.
(Maybe one could say that even if music videos are technically similar to newschool limitless demos, only in the demoscene the technical aspect is supposed to given emphasis as an equal (?) factor to aesthetics)
One thing that makes me doubt the approach to define the demoscene from its competition aspect is that it's easy to enjoy demoscene as an unique experience without paying much attention to competition. You can watch or participate in compos like you would do in an art exhibition. And there's of course some ranking happening in the mind of audience also in an art exhibition.
(Maybe one could say that even if music videos are technically similar to newschool limitless demos, only in the demoscene the technical aspect is supposed to given emphasis as an equal (?) factor to aesthetics)
One thing that makes me doubt the approach to define the demoscene from its competition aspect is that it's easy to enjoy demoscene as an unique experience without paying much attention to competition. You can watch or participate in compos like you would do in an art exhibition. And there's of course some ranking happening in the mind of audience also in an art exhibition.
angelo: can't wait to see your soon-to-be-published paper, and then we shall see which data points you have discarded to make it work. :-)
ok so taking a brief look through bifats post history also shows him being anti-vaxx.
And taking a very brief look through your, Dubmood's, posting history reveals you to be a simpleton. :-)
angelo: Does your research start in the early 1990s or before that? The interesting times would be early to mid 1980's, and west of the iron curtain.
Regardless of how you feel about vaccines, that's a bit of an ad hominem argument...
When certain C64 demoscene artifacts were released, and this is even more true in case of Amiga - there was nothing else like it in the world. Literally nothing. These days, some “unlimited” demos with gargantuan filesizes look like lameish music videos to me. Some get a lot of praise, some even get rewards (no I won’t name any names). Back to the topic title = of course non-scener is going to be confused by demos of the mentioned sort, because with today’s pro digital A/V tools widely available and user friendly, what’s the point? Where’s the magic? Uniqueness? Mystique? Why would a (often) bad realtime music video be praised over (often) better music video rendered offline? Why not render it all to h.265 and be done with it? Oh but that’s not demoscene-ish. Exactly. So, in my opinion, without self-imposed limits, demoscene becomes kinda pointless. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, I’m speaking strictly for myself of course.
absence: And not the first one in this here thread. :|
absence is right. Sorry, Dubmood, for ad-hominem.
Quote:
Regardless of how you feel about vaccines, that's a bit of an ad hominem argument...
Maybe you can interpret it that way, but I was just pointing out that bitfat is showing a history of being immune to stuff like science and changing opinion due to overwhelming evidence.
If that's the state of affairs in overwhelming evidence to support a cracking scene origin of demos, then I guess we're finished here. :-)
Quote:
but I was just pointing out that bitfat is showing a history of being immune to stuff like science and changing opinion due to overwhelming evidence.
Does he nevertheless have a heliocentric worldview? Thinks stars are fixed in the sphere of fire, no? Still lights his cigars with flogiston?
Yeah, Bifat is a typical tech nerd that thinks he can win an argument about a social structure on a technicality. Which is obviously absurd, as there are many influences and variables determining a cultural movement.
Who cares someone made what one might consider a 'demo' in 1982 before the scene was established as such, there are always outliers.
Also, there are many STEM professionals with dumb opinions on other sciences. The fact you are smart in one field doesn't mean you are smart in all fields.
Who cares someone made what one might consider a 'demo' in 1982 before the scene was established as such, there are always outliers.
Also, there are many STEM professionals with dumb opinions on other sciences. The fact you are smart in one field doesn't mean you are smart in all fields.
Now Bifat will call me the dutch troll brigade or whatever, cause he can't actually argue real subjects.
But Okkie and Dubmood, you can lose any argument with ease and grandeur by citing "overwhelming evidence" without citing overwhelming evidence. And then you can weigh in that science is not science.
Of course this here has got zero to do with science, this is cultural, debate. Bringing up points. Oh, and I have no degrees, neither in STEM nor elsewhere. But what's the point?
Of course this here has got zero to do with science, this is cultural, debate. Bringing up points. Oh, and I have no degrees, neither in STEM nor elsewhere. But what's the point?
See, some fluffy wordiness that means nothing. Im not looking for a discussion tbh, you believe what you believe, i don't give a shit really. Just wanted to point out how you reason.