You are deep into fixing a bug where the customer wants to view entries in a report in a different order, but calling the method to sort the array turns on the sprinkler system in your on-premise server room for reasons that nobody can recall (or diagnose). It is at this moment that it is hardest to remember that programming can be fun.
We are looking at entertainment in this issue, and obviously there are examples of computing being used to generate entertainment for consumption. In my Library article, I go in depth into the state of the computer games industry. We see film, music, and television creators regularly using computers in their work, from the earliest examples on the silver screen (the computer-generated opening credits sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie Vertigo), through consumerisation of the tools (Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor released one of their songs as a GarageBand project in 2005), to today’s creative processes where everything between the camera lens and the screen goes through a digital pipeline. Even if you buy a vinyl record, it was probably mastered in Logic or Pro Tools and the digital bits sent to an analog decoder to create the die that presses the grooves into the semi-molten PVC.
This article leaves all of that aside. Instead, let us take a look at an area where programming itself is the entertainment (this publication being The Programming Itself, after all): the demoscene.
If you are anything like me (basically, if you are about my age) then your idea of the demoscene is people dressed like characters from the Matrix or Hackers, with appropriately cyberpunk nicknames: PSI, Abyss, Purple Motion (all members of the Future Crew demogroup). They gather around their computer of choice (maybe a Commodore 64 or Amiga, or a Sinclair Spectrum), equipped only with a couple of cold pizzas and a crate of Club Maté, and they create digital art.
In fact that did happen and does still happen, but it is only a part of the demo scene. Many of these people who were kids or teenagers when they started are adults now, and have families and jobs. A large number of those jobs are of course in the IT industry, because the enjoyment and community they found by creating demos enthused them to work on computers as much as they could. Still others are in related fields: digital graphics and music, for example.
A large part of the scene was about free access to the computer’s capabilities, so some scenesters became Free Software advocates and Open Source developers—Daniel Stenberg, the creator of curl, is C64 demoscene creator “bagder”. Others even became lawyers campaigning for an open internet and supporting organisations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The cyberpunk and cypherpunk ethos of information wanting to be free still has resonance among its members.
So what is a demo? On the one hand, it is a program that shows off the capabilities of the computer it runs on. Commodore scored a huge marketing coup with their “Boing!” demo, which not only animated a rotating 3D polygon following a bouncing parabolic path, but also synchronized it with sound effects, and multitasked with whatever else you ran on the Amiga. Other demos notable for their technological wizardry include “Chaos Theory” by Conspiracy, a 4-minute exploration of a 3D universe with music and a plot packed into a 64k PC executable, and “Echologia” by Busysoft, which packs over 28 minutes of music and graphics onto a ZX Spectrum.
On the other hand, it is a program that shows off the capabilities of the programmer(s) who created the demo. It is not merely impressive that the computer can do this stuff, it is impressive that somebody can get the computer to do it. Creators like Fairlight and Virtual Dreams are famous not only through the scene, but through the communities of public domain library users who get their software through public domain disk releases, bulletin board systems, and share parties.
Remembering the community ethos of freedom, there is a big overlap between the world of demos, and the world of software cracking—defeating copy-protection mechanisms in proprietary software to make it easier to distribute (and, coincidentally, easier for the people who paid for the software to use it once they lose the manual, sheet, or dongle with the copy-protection codes). Cracktros provide a place for crackers to gain credit for their work, give shout-outs to their friends, and demonstrate their own coding skills: all within the constraints of the bootloader that launches the cracked software. For some people, the Lemmings cracktro by Skid Row is as much of an earworm as the actual in-game music. ESI’s cracktro for Maniac Mansion on the C64 is probably more advanced use of the computer’s hardware than the game itself.
Contemporary computing platforms need to enable the demoscene’s level of exploration, discovery, sharing, and fun to build an enthusiastic and creative community of implementors and evangelists who will use their platforms to the utmost, and create things that enable others to do the same. If people cannot see a whole universe of possibilities with your AI-enabled pin badge or rinkydink 3D glasses, they are not going to buy them.
Cover image credit: screenshot from “Starstruck” by the Black Lotus.