Editorial: Why Outreach?

By Adok/Hugi

"So you've heard something about the demoscene. You know that it's a collection of highly talented digital artists from around the world who produce mind blowing demonstrations on all sorts of computer hardware. Now you want to know more.. more about the demos and about the people behind them, but you don't know where to start? Well you've come to the right place! Us dedicated people here at Demoscene Outreach have all joined up for a mission.. a mission to spread the gospel of the demoscene to the entire world."

Outreach, how to make the demoscene more popular outside of the scene, has recently become a topic in discussion boards again, after Gargaj's, Gloom's and Steeler's outreach tour to San Francisco and the Realtime Generation exhibition in Vienna. What sense do activities in demoscene outreach make? To answer this question, we must ask ourselves whom we can reach with outreach activities.

- Gamers / general computer users: Most people exhibitions, newspaper articles and the like will reach belong to these categories. Most probably, they will be passive consumers. Do we really need more demo watchers? They occupy a lot of bandwidth and make the expenditures for the scene.org servers rise. They only cause costs, but no profit. However, it's possible that some of them will become active demo-makers. If not the next Chaos, it may be that the next Reed or Little Bitchard will come from this group. But this will be only a tiny percentage. So, should we really do outreach for this group? Is it worth the effort?

- Gamedev people / artists: If we address these people who are involved in related fields, then it's more probable that we will find new potential demoscene activists.

- Industry: Gargaj's tour to San Francisco was an effort at making companies interested in the demoscene. This is an exciting opportunity since companies have money and they can sponsor us. This can result in bigger prize money at demo competitions, for example. Or, they could pay for the costs scene.org generates, etc. That is a situation in which sceners win.

- Academia: If we get academia to be interested in the demoscene, we will be able to expect scientific reports about the demoscene. This possibility is also quite cool, although it will not give us money.

Conclusion

Demoscene outreach should not waste time and energy with "Joe Lamers", but should focus on big institutions such as companies and universities. Then the scene could profit from it.

Welcome!

A new issue of Hugi is waiting for you. Ra and Fabian (LoneStar) contributed the main graphics from this issue - you have already seen some of them. The first theme is Ra's work, the second theme was made by me (the background was generated by a program I coded), and the third theme is from Fabian. You can switch between the themes in the Options menu. The music was contributed by Jogeir Liljedahl, Siatek, Buzzer, Mice and Traymuss. The code is Chris Dragan's work, as it has been since issue 18.

We have articles about 256b intros, Masagin, Hauptsache Strobo, women behind demosceners, multi-platform demos, Realtime Generation, Assembly, Icons, Scenecon, Evoke, Main, Block Party, interviews with a couple of people including Unlock, ps, Ra and Fairfax, and a mixed corner with coding tutorials, stories and other things. I wish you a happy reading.

To show you that Hugi is not the only diskmag that is worth reading, this issue also contains the first part of the Diskmag Encyclopedia - a review of (almost) all international demoscene-related diskmags ever released for PCs.

Because it has been the subject of controversial discussions in scene-related forums, I'll mention it here: In March 2008 the person who used to call himself EP sent an email to the Rotterdam University, which is hosting the valuable scene.org server (and the Hugi website), in which he asked to shut the scene.org server down. He argued in this mail that the demoscene was a "cracking community", scene.org contained illegal content and demosceners were people with bad habits such as drinking alcohol. Of course these accusitions are nonsense (except maybe the part about alcohol, but who cares?) and the Rotterdam University didn't shut down scene.org, but they forwarded the mail to the scene.org admins and the scene.org admins posted it to a scene forum. It was the mad solo action of a lunatic, but since EP used to contribute articles to Hugi and also signed his mails with a link to the Hugi website, some sceners erroneously associated the incident with Hugi. To clear it up: EP had no right to speak in the name of Hugi, he was just a freelance contributor! Everybody can send us articles and we publish them unless we decide not to do so for some reason. We will, however, not publish articles written by EP any more, no matter what pseudonym he might be using. In this context, I want to follow an old demoscene tradition and send fuckings to (that is, express my disapproval of) Scamp of Vacuum, Breakpoint organizer, for stirring up opinion against Hugi and the members of its staff.

Adok/Hugi