Demoparties and Internet

Written by Seffren

Have you ever wondered why there are so many demoparties but, with the exception of Overseas, none solely Internet based? The advantages of such of a party would surely be worth considering. Let me mention the most important ones:

- ALL groups can contribute to the competitions regardless of their homecountry. I know most (known) groups are from Europe, but there's a lot of groups from elsewhere who have a hard (expensive) time attending EU parties.

- All submissions can be watched the way they should be: pictures can be closely examined, demos/intros/animations/modules can be watched/listened to multiple times, etc. Also, anyone who had anything displayed on a big screen knows that it does not look like intended, it's often too dark or too blurry. With competitions like this everyone would watch your production on the same media as you made it, that is a PC, not in some noisy partyhall with 500 kids playing Quake.

Don't forget that many party productions only work on the machine-type that the party-rules state and therefore fail to run on other types until the group/person releases a "final" version.

Personally I wouldn't hesitate to give crappy scores to an entry that only works on a few systems (which you'll never know from watching at a normal party).

I realize that the social factor is "gone" with this kind of party, but according to my own experiences most people spend the time at a demoparty with either finishing their competition entries or chatting on IRC anyway.

I'm sure some people would argue that it's too expensive to download all the contributions over a modem and such, but it must be must cheaper than attending a normal party.

Due to people running the production on their own hardware and being able to examine it much closer than a single presentation on a bigscreen, I'm also confident that the quality of each production would be higher than it would have been at a normal party, since groups will release fewer "party versions" and more "finals".

I hope someone will find this idea interesting enough to organize a "party" like this.

- Seffren - Defacto 2 Productions.