A demoparty is a meeting for the demoscene, usually starting on friday evening and lasting till sunday
afternoon. They vary in size between 50 visitors for local parties and 5000 visitors for international ones.
People bring their computer along during those days, and sleep very little (if at all). There
are competitions in several categories: modular music, handdrawn graphics, raytraced graphics, intros, demos and animations. All productions are shown on a big screen with a projector, and with powerful loudspeakers.
The productions are judged either by a jury, or by public voting, and in the end the best ones are awarded in the prize ceremony.
Besides the competitive aspect, demoparties are also great for meeting your friends face to face and share a beer.
Although demoparties are great, after each one a large number of visitors will invariably complain on how it sucked. There can be a million reasons why a party sucks, some good, some less:
- The compo schedule was delayed! Note that compos are always delayed, but it can be annoying if the organizers don't tell for how long.
- Voting sucked! Often this means only that the speaker's production didn't won.
- The security guards sucked! This might mean the speaker was completely drunk, puked on the floor and was thrown out.
- Too little productions, or low-quality productions. Happens a lot at small parties.
- Too much glamers (see below)
If a party really sucked, this can be used as an argument to prove that the scene is dying!.
In the good old days, the only people who visited a demoparty were demosceners. But since LANs became commonplace at parties, the number of non-scener visitors raised. These people
spend the whole weekend playing multiplayer games or downloading stuff (mostly porn or warez).
A lot of sceners are very unhappy about these glamers, because:
- Some show a blatant lack of respect for the scene, f.e. : not turning your speakers down during the music compos.
- They have no clue about the technical aspect of demos, and will often vote for inferior demos.
- They are not creative at all.
- Some can't even understand why one would rather create something free for all instead of selling it, and call the sceners stupid.
- They decrease the scenesh feeling, as you can't start a conversation with a random person about the demoscene. At large parties, sometimes up to 90% of the visitors are non-sceners.
As a reaction, parties such as Mekka/Symposium or LTP have adapted a strict non-gaming policy, with packet filters against the most popular games installed on the network.