Non-scener's confusion about the scene
category: general [glöplog]
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And as far as I'm aware, the events we know as demoparties today can be dated back to copy-parties with demo competitions.
If you go back to only about 1988, when this stuff was in full bloom and some people retired already. Demos existed long before there were compos, and every party back then was a copy party - but that doesn't mean that everything copied was cracks and illegal. The culture was there before compos, and in the beginning it was mostly relayed through mail and BBS. If it doesn't matter here, I wouldn't know where. :-)
Apart from that, I'd like to share an anecdote from after the Evoke seminar. Two elderly attendants sat with us to the very end. Authors, writing a book about small subcultures that were recently acknowledged by the UNESCO. They had visited many of them already.
Their contributition, after having introduced themselves along the line of above, was also the closing one:
"We didn't know what to expect. Computer nerds for sure. We didn't expect to find a bunch of people who were able to reflect about their culture with so much depth and on this level. We're profoundly impressed by that. It's an outstanding achievement for us."
Their contributition, after having introduced themselves along the line of above, was also the closing one:
"We didn't know what to expect. Computer nerds for sure. We didn't expect to find a bunch of people who were able to reflect about their culture with so much depth and on this level. We're profoundly impressed by that. It's an outstanding achievement for us."
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If it doesn't matter here, I wouldn't know where. :-)
It was more of a curious question: What's the matter with the matter? Is this about distancing from illegality? The culture surrounding it? Preserving an alternating perspective? Or what else comes to mind? What's the pain point for you about all this, if any?
I'm afraid the lore is set. And if people asked me about the Demoscene's origins, I'd also resort to the cracking scene. Because it's been my entry point, too.
At the same time, I'm very serious about my request. Because as a Technohead predating its mark on popular culture, I very much understand the notion of 'cultural loss'. For the lack of a better word.
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Preserving an alternating perspective?
Yes, this perhaps.
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I'm afraid the lore is set. And if people asked me about the Demoscene's origins, I'd also resort to the cracking scene. Because it's been my entry point, too.
If it doesn't even interest you, then maybe you are condemned to carry on with a cargo cult. :-)
Crucial question here is which is the point when the demoscene as we know it and which forms the continuum to the present scene had formed. Of course there has always been some kind of demos but for a long time they didn't constitute a scene of any sort.
The inseparable connection between demoscene and cracking looks clear when we go to the point where we clearly are in the early phase of the demoscene. If we take a look of Amiga demos released in 1987 it looks pretty obvious they continue at the footsteps of cracktros.
The inseparable connection between demoscene and cracking looks clear when we go to the point where we clearly are in the early phase of the demoscene. If we take a look of Amiga demos released in 1987 it looks pretty obvious they continue at the footsteps of cracktros.
And it is important that when the scene was born, demos in it had clearly a coherent style. It was not anymore some just visual displays of any sort (like Boing ball and Juggler) but there was a unified style.
So now you are resorting to an "unified style" to align your idea of a demo (according to your imagination) with the reality of demos predating cracktros?
So dimissing what is not in the crackintro style at an approriate time - not "demoscene demos", but something else?
So dimissing what is not in the crackintro style at an approriate time - not "demoscene demos", but something else?
Well, if we use the term 'demo' in a broad sense then the works of John Whitney in the 1960s count as demos, even if there was no 'scene' then like there was later. That would be before there were even any videogames to crack at all, but there is likely no social link between John Whitney and 1980s demo or cracking scenes. So does Catalog count as a 'demo before cracks' then?
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So now you are resorting to an "unified style" to align your idea of a demo (according to your imagination) with the reality of demos predating cracktros?
It takes more to constitute a scene than just separate visual demos of some sort. And the wider social context matters too, not just the content of demos.
We don't need to make such a strong claim that cracktro aesthetics is a necessary precondition for an early demo to belong to the continuum that forms the demoscene but it is a strong indicator of there being a scene with some coherence instead of just demos without the scene. Other indicators include groups with mutual connections and events.
fizzer: Without knowing John Whitney too well, yes, I look first at the works, and only second to cultural idenity. We don't know what was inspired by what and whom and when. I wouldn't even go as far back as the 70s and 60s - the point that got me started questioning the "demos emerged from cracktros" thing was when I learned that my own group was founded with the clear intent of making just demos, and not cracks. That was in 1986, it was a conceptual thing, and there were only very local parties at that time. With that in mind I found lots of other groups and works from that time (and earlier) with the same idea. I'm not saying that cracktros and demoscene were separate. I'm saying people had different interests, the difference often went through the same groups, and the excessive swapping was a perfect carrier for demos (which already existed).
In the '80s, at least all the early sceners within my social circle (myself included) got acquainted with the scene through crack intros.
Would be interesting to be able to automatically search through a database of all scrolltexts and diskmags or other nfo files, to see when certain notions appeared, for example what's the earliest mention of "demoscene" in text. That would be pretty hard of course, to extract all scrollers from all intros, match them in time (a lot of these early demos, you can't be sure of the date of release), then do some historical search.
I was also bewildered by other strange facts I didn't know. I was reading Freax and it was mentioned that in the USA, the demo parts are called pages. So, an intro would say "press space to load the next page" instead of "part". I though it was a wild claim when I read it at Freax, never heard it before, but I must have found at some point an early NTSC C64 demo, where in the scrolltext it was saying "page" instead of "part". Can't find it now though, but there might be plenty. Pretty weird, I thought originally this factoid in Freax was wrong, but not sure now.
I was also bewildered by other strange facts I didn't know. I was reading Freax and it was mentioned that in the USA, the demo parts are called pages. So, an intro would say "press space to load the next page" instead of "part". I though it was a wild claim when I read it at Freax, never heard it before, but I must have found at some point an early NTSC C64 demo, where in the scrolltext it was saying "page" instead of "part". Can't find it now though, but there might be plenty. Pretty weird, I thought originally this factoid in Freax was wrong, but not sure now.
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I look first at the works, and only second to cultural idenity.
I think this is a very important point. We can use technical definitions of a demo, but whether people agree on the cultural aspect of what is or isn't a demo (did the creator call it a demo, was it released at a demoparty etc. ) is pretty much orthogonal to them. There are works entered into demo compos which don't resemble technical-skill-showoff demos at all, but we still call them demos. I expect some people would disagree that they are demos anyway.
So as usual this kind of research comes down to definitions. What is the definition of 'demo' that you are using, bifat?
I recall a debate about the term "demoscene". If I remember it correctly, this term was first used in a diskmag in the 1990s. Before that, all sorts of creative computing activities were just called "the scene". (NB: I don't have any sources to back up these claims.)
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What is the definition of 'demo' that you are using, bifat?
A predominantly non-interactive program for some kind of machine using most of the machine's multimedia channels for output, and containing some sort of communication with the recipient. If not all criteria are met, then pundits shall fight it out on a case-to-case basis. :-)
For example, in my circles it's a recurring topic if Piccolo Mouso is a demo. I would say no - because it misses too many marks (communication and sound), but other definitions are even more inclusive.
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If it doesn't even interest you, then maybe you are condemned to carry on with a cargo cult. :-)
I can't follow your reasoning. I'm very much interested in the perspectives of others. Hence my question.
At the same time, my connection to our subculture is based on people and being creative together. And less rooted in what consitutes as demo and what doesn't. At the same time, I'm well aware that others relate in other ways. Which is what I'm curious about. Because, people stuff.
I feel that the discussion is missing a connection between the examples of early non-interactive multimedia software and the demo scene. Just because a piece of software can be called a "demo" if it demonstrates something doesn't mean it's a demo scene production, and it doesn't mean that the demo scene evolved from such demos.
Sounds to me like you demand an explanation for that there were a multitude of demos and scenes already (one for each platform), and people dared to call them demos and swapped them together with all the other stuff for their respective platforms, but didn't wait for a committee to coin the term demoscene. ;-)
The continuity is there. People started ripping gfx and music from games and each other, complemented stuff with their own creations and reassembled them with texts to their own liking. Bigger groups did both (check out Triad, Finnish Gold, Razor 1911, to name but a few), others specialized more on making their own gfx and music (Pure-Byte, Supply Team, TEK, ...). From the latter kind the first demo-only groups emerged. The term demoscene was still years away.
The continuity is there. People started ripping gfx and music from games and each other, complemented stuff with their own creations and reassembled them with texts to their own liking. Bigger groups did both (check out Triad, Finnish Gold, Razor 1911, to name but a few), others specialized more on making their own gfx and music (Pure-Byte, Supply Team, TEK, ...). From the latter kind the first demo-only groups emerged. The term demoscene was still years away.
So I guess it's more correct to say that demoscene came out of the same community that the cracking scene did, rather than that the demoscene came out of the cracking scene?
I think you can make the argument that, when you have a bunch of humans who end up essentially doing the same "thing" independently (in this case I'm drawing on bifat's definition of a demo) despite no personal or social connection to one another and at different temporal points, that there is something psychologically and/or culturally inevitable about that "thing".
In other words - there wasn't really a clear "genesis" to this. In the specific set of cultural conditions in which computers emerged, it was always going to happen that people were going to make stuff like this.
In other words - there wasn't really a clear "genesis" to this. In the specific set of cultural conditions in which computers emerged, it was always going to happen that people were going to make stuff like this.
Optimus
Fizzer
I was referring to that old myth that demoscene somehow was spawned from cracking scene, rather than co-evolving with some overlap pretty much at the same time. =)
This discussion has gone on quite a bit since i last checked this thread (with other people sharing my sentiment), so, sorry that this post does not bring anything new to the table other than replying with above clarification.
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@Krill? Which one is a myth? I am just curious to learn if I was spreading falshood, I used to write in articles that "the scene evolved from crackers who started being more interested in the crack intros creation than the actual cracking".
Fizzer
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I'm also interested in the myth-debunking as Optimus is. I've told people the same thing, because I thought it was true.
I was referring to that old myth that demoscene somehow was spawned from cracking scene, rather than co-evolving with some overlap pretty much at the same time. =)
This discussion has gone on quite a bit since i last checked this thread (with other people sharing my sentiment), so, sorry that this post does not bring anything new to the table other than replying with above clarification.
So. I mean, we‘re literally sitting on a huge database here. So what are examples of early demos from the scene’s formative years that cannot traced back to cracktros? If the demoscene didn’t evolve from cracked games, there should be a lot.
(and btw, that excludes prods by people who haven’t made any cracktros themselves but wanted to do something like that just without a game. This falls under „evolved from“ in my book.)
The point is that there was considerable overlap (wrt involved people and everything that follows) at some early point, and that both scenes "separated" into two distinct entities only quite some time later, after the fact of existing cracks, intros, demos and whatnot.
The case that demoscene actually evolved from cracking could be based on these premises:
1) Early demos – those demos which actually preceded later demoscene, which were made by groups which later identified as demoscene groups – seemed to be cracktros (or series of cracktros) without a crack.
2) Demoparties seemed to have their predecessor in copyparties.
3) While some early demomakers started directly with demomaking instead of going through a cracker phase, also there are claims from pioneers that virtually everybody there were into cracking.
4) Demoscene not getting born in the US or Japan proves that no individual demos lead to the scene but a stronger cultural context is needed.
Of course, it is not possible to settle the issue definitively. Demoscene could have emerged in various alternative ways. But it looks to me that it's rather the strongest hypothesis than a myth that the demoscene was born out of cracking.
1) Early demos – those demos which actually preceded later demoscene, which were made by groups which later identified as demoscene groups – seemed to be cracktros (or series of cracktros) without a crack.
2) Demoparties seemed to have their predecessor in copyparties.
3) While some early demomakers started directly with demomaking instead of going through a cracker phase, also there are claims from pioneers that virtually everybody there were into cracking.
4) Demoscene not getting born in the US or Japan proves that no individual demos lead to the scene but a stronger cultural context is needed.
Of course, it is not possible to settle the issue definitively. Demoscene could have emerged in various alternative ways. But it looks to me that it's rather the strongest hypothesis than a myth that the demoscene was born out of cracking.