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Alright SO at my husband's request, a brief thread on why the disappearance of Flash is a disaster for video game archival efforts. https://twitter.com/danielzklein/status/1336795383301730304
Film preservation is heavily aided by the fact that the 35mm reel was standardized very early into film distribution. And there's no copyright or patent or whatever on the mechanism of projecting a 35 mm reel. Anyone can make a player work.
Less common film reels like 9.5 mm do suffer from a lack of preservation efforts, but even then the mechanism of projection remains the same, so it is still possible & in fact quite simple & cheap to build a projector to display these films.
What I'm saying is, film archives don't really suffer from the problem of access. It might be dangerous to project some 35 mm films, but ultimately the technology is freely available, & film scanning might damage the reel but the reel itself you can still see the frames.
But video games are platform-dependent in a way that film archives are not. You can't just plug video game source code into any available platform. By necessity, games are made to be played on certain software & hardware. So you must preserve those platforms as much as the games.
Flash was monumentally important to a very specific era of video games. Not just video games, but really the web altogether, that liminal space between game & interactive experience that so defined modern web interaction.
If you want a fantastic study of Flash's importance from a platform studies perspective, I can't recommend this book enough: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/flash
For a generation of game developers, Flash was where they began their careers. The ease of creating & distributing small Flash-based games on communal sites like Newgrounds was monumentally impactful on game development.
There's an era of video game development that, sadly, has not been preserved as much as I wish: the text-based era. Games like Colossal Cave Adventure, they were interactive fiction computer games that were modded by players as they discovered the code.
Interactive fiction computer games were taken from one computer lab to another as players modded, added, remixed them. It was hugely impactful on early game development. And due to a lack of preservation, most of those games are lost, or the metadata is sparse at best.
Community-distributed video games haven't always received the same academic & collector focus as studio-created games, but the line between studio & homebrew is thin throughout video game history.
Homebrew creators often become video game developers themselves, who go on to create studio games, who inspire a new generation of homebrew creators, & the cycle continues. So we need to preserve these community-distributed games to have a full picture of gaming history.
But interactive fiction computer games, at least those games were text. You don't need special software to open them up. We've simply lost them.
Flash-based games aren't lost, they're at threat of inaccessibility.
Flash-based games aren't lost, they're at threat of inaccessibility.
Well this isn't very brief huh? Welp.
Flash-based games depend on Flash to remain accessible. It doesn't matter if we still have these games b/c without Flash itself, they're locked boxes without keys. And that is the risk losing Flash threatened us with.
It turns out the rumors of Flash's demise were highly exaggerated. Archival groups, players, collectors, devs, they've all come together to find ways to still access Flash & preserve sites like Newgrounds for future use. And bravo to them for that important work!
But the end of Flash, even if not the disaster it could've been, is the end of an era of community-distributed free games that build & comment & riff on one another. And that was a beautiful time in game history.
It makes me super emotional to see how the game communities have come together to ensure Flash's death doesn't take its games & history with it. There's emulators like this one already out there: https://ruffle.rs/
Flash wasn't just used for games, as I said, so less interactive forms of media have simply moved to new platforms, like Homestar Runner animation: https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom/videos
The end of Flash could've been a disaster. It could've been an archival nightmare akin to the loss of interactive fiction times a thousand. It really could've been a Dark Ages for video game history.
And it wasn't. Why? People care about video game archiving now.
And it wasn't. Why? People care about video game archiving now.
As Andrew notes, we haven't saved everything. We have issues with preserving some of the content out there. And I don't want to diminish how sad that is: https://twitter.com/Borman18/status/1336857078925832194?s=20
But when I first heard Flash would no longer be supported, I honestly *cried* b/c I thought This Was It, this was the game history apocalypse I dreaded. And, it turned out, that wasn't true. People actually care now. Which blows me away.
People came together to save Flash-based games just as people came together to create Flash-based games. And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. We should celebrate that.
We should acknowledge the hard work of those that preserved Flash & its content. We should talk about the efforts that led to this. And we should mourn the games we cannot play for a myriad of reasons.
We should use Flash's story to remind us of something we'd rather forget: we are losing video game history. And we are losing it fast. We CAN come together to save it. We did for Flash-based content. We can do it for all of video game history.
We just have to, you know, DO IT.
We just have to, you know, DO IT.
And we can do it. We can save video game history. We can do the work. And we can preserve not just source code but these very real, important pieces of people's lives that should be a treasured part of the medium we love.
It only gets harder to preserve video game history from here on in. Let's hope Flash's demise is a sign that preservation efforts will become more centrally important in the future!
Check out a sub thread here by my friend @Borman18 on further issues in game preservation (also just follow him, he's fantastic): https://twitter.com/Borman18/status/1336857857954902017?s=20
If you learned something from this thread, I'm an out-of-work video game archivist & this is quite literally my day job if I had one, but I don't, so drop a tip for me at http://paypal.me/remembrancermx
