I'd argue it's because they're universally rather dull.
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.
> how they manage to overcome the limitations imposed by the scene
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.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. 4k/64k have been around for a long time, close to 20 years. Demos are generally "anything goes" and for anything else there are usually a "wild compo".
I remember demos on Ataris, Amigas, and early PCs, 286s, 386s. Back then there were no scene-imposed limitations, because the hardware was seriously limiting what you could do, and the awesomeness of demos lay in overcoming the crap hardware.
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.
I always tought that the tiny hint of a narrative was why I've seen Debris[1] reach much more nerds than other demos, not its spectacularly small file size.
This is a very interesting question. I believe that demos didn't "take off" simply because most people don't find them interesting. If you ask me, the main reasons behind this are the inherent geekiness of this subculture (it's difficult to appreciate the craftsmanship behind demos for most people) as well as the fact that most of the active "sceners" are typically young people who don't necessarily have enough life experience or maturity yet to be able send a meaningful message with a lasting value that could capture the attention of a wider audience (this was definitely true for me). By the time they "grow up", they have jobs and families and other responsibilities and don't have time to produce demos.
I find this probably invalid, attractive though it may be. There are many "high art" forms that do not convey the massive effort put in to creating an image, yet it is this effort that makes the pieces desirable (lithography is one, but actually most art takes a lot more than the layperson realizes). Most examples of this came out of necessity but moved to an art form once the necessity was gone (though this was a very slow process). I think demos just haven't been around long enough for a larger artistic culture to build around them. Either art collectors will need to decide that demos are art, or the demo-scene itself needs to produce collectors. I think it's more likely that demos will become a small subculture within "programs as art", where art games will probably lead, since they are doing a better job of promotion and marketing outside their base.
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.
Interactive demo-like things have been taking off lately, but mostly under the label "games" (which sells more), even in the case where the game-ness is pretty minimal. Not sure if they're explicitly inspired by the demoscene or not, but interactive-procedural-graphics-and-sound stuff like Proteus feels very much like a demoscene production to me (http://www.visitproteus.com/). Main difference imo is more focus on the procedural interactivity from an experiential perspective, and less focus on technical virtuosity.
There was a commercial demo released for the PS3 on PSN called Linger in Shadows(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linger_in_Shadows), sold for $3. Farbrausch also released a commercial PSN demo called .detuned. I'm surprised the demo scene hasn't released more productions for iOS or Android. It seems like impressive non-interactive or semi-interactive demos with no game play would do alright either ad supported or at the $0.99 price point. I'm not sure if the average person would really get the difference between a real time non-interactive demo and a video playing on their phone, though.
Funny thing, someone tried to submit a demo to appstore. It got insta-failed approval for the use of the word “demo” in the description, because don't allow “demo versions” of applications in the store. He tried to explain the nature of the application, and in the end still didn't get through approval, exactly because it didn't have any interactivity, so there was no perceived use for users.
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? :)
Some demos have interactive components I believe, though I'm having trouble digging up a prominent example at the moment. Not as games per se, but in the sense that the graphics/audio can change procedurally in response to keystrokes.
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.
Our Heartquake back in '94 had a flyby sequence over a voxel landscape. The path was predesigned, but you could take control at any moment by pressing keys or the mouse. I thought more demos would incorporate such optional interactivity in more subtle ways and more types of effects (ours was kind of obvious), but it didn't happen.
Yes, there is, but the way to break in is to start with things incorporating programs in small ways within a larger piece, call it experimental, and slowly make the composition more computer-centric.
I'm skeptical about that. I think that the issue is that even algorithmic beauty could be considered just aesthetics and people except more than beauty from art, as has (post-)modernism demonstrated very clearly.
Culture. In fact, the GP answered it. Demos are all about awesome for the sake of awesomeness.
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.
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.