The use of demos
Demos are made to give you joy, to get a mental trip. It's like any other leisure activity in real life: it's done to spend your spare time well, it's a way to get some joy and give you happiness. It's psychological pleasure, but also a bodily pleasure as emotions come from what you see and listen to in the mirror of your mind. Then they spread all over your body. Yes, demos make you happy - well, at least some.
For their makers, demos aren't visual or auditive experiments only. They are also an intellectual experience: "So they succeeded in making this?", "How is it done?", "How to reproduce / improve it?", "Who has done this?" and a lot of other questions are in coders' mind when they watch a demo.
Demos are in part art, in part technology and in part mind puzzle solving. Demos are a way of expression. Demos are illusion attraction: we can't touch them, but they exist in RAM and HD and PC hardware. Demos are logical signals in a special order for a determined time. Demos are a whole in which a lot of components make the good recipe. And at parties sceners take a special lunch: How good will the 64KB show be this year? What is the sauce (aka fashion, style) of this year? And like with any good lunch a lot of people are involved. This makes parties interesting as a social phenomenon.
Demos are a way to socialize some particular people. This is the most important part of the scene. Sceners are social guys: they help each other and they build groups to get more power to create. Are they lunatics? Well, yes, if we consider that they sit on a chair for hours, watching something drawn on the screen, or drawing / rendering pictures / anims, tracking zik.
But millions of people also sit in front of their television sets and they aren't called lunatics. In fact sceners are screen hypnotised, they are dreaming. But some aren't dreaming all their time, they are lucid enough to build something new and beautiful: a demo.
This requires a lots of free time, a lot of organisation, art and mathematics and physics skills.
This isn't lunatic, this is artistic and self-denial. Yes, sceners are good guys, strange guys, but U know: everybody is mad in this world so sceners aren't so different from others and they have a lot of qualities: irc and emails show me that sceners are really social guys, open minded, talking about things and truth we don't find anywhere else. Only pouet is polluted, so I will avoid it from now. Virii guys are too much time there and it's dangerous for my health.
In fact sceners are like girls: sceners demos are their babies. They love their computers as they bring them some sort of communication, some sort of exchange : I give you orders, and you give me messages and good pictures, good program, good musics, ...
Ah yes, money! Sceners spend a lot of time for - it seems - nothing else but fame or most often only fun.
Yes, money isn't their main aim in life. They strive for better code, better algorithms, better sound, better gfx, but not for more money, this is part of the demomaker spirit: demos are made to make us dream and be happy. Demos are art, demos are a language understandable by educated people only.