While I find this of great interest, I really have no place in the technical debate between Flash and HTML5. It's just that the gradual snuffing out of Flash's relevance means that, as it's so often the case in the digital world, a chapter will end, transforming what was once a standard mode of communication into ephemera.
The days of Flash are far from gone but let's follow through on a thought experiment; what would change in a flashless web? While webpage design will live on through an adaptation to HTML5 protocols, a gradual and almost invisible movement that has already begun, and movie embedding will espouse the new native film script within the code, I believe that one peculiar bit of web paraphernalia, the flash game, will suffer most.
In the early days of web plug-ins, the small browser-based game was Macromedia's ambassador. I remember being redirected to Macromedia site for Shockwave support and being greeted with the promise of over a dozen free games playable within my Netscape browser. The link between Shockwave and Flash is confusing, but the Shockwave plug-in was so popular that Macromedia branded its Flash plug-in the "Shockwave Flash Player." Likewise, the Shockwave Site, created in 1999 by Adobe to showcase its products' potential proposed simplified games that became the staple of the Flash player. As far as I can see, the site now only offers Flash games. This enmeshed history has left a very obvious mark in the Flash file extension; .swf (or Shock Wave Flash).
At the time of Macromedia's reign I had the age where the kind of hyper-digression offered by free games was at the heart of the web experience, an age when extraneous links are actual discovery possibilities, rather than annoying distractions, I found myself coming back to Macromedia's site time and again, even when my plug-ins were up-to-date, hoping for new distractions to fill my adolescent time. At the time, these games were mostly adaptations of classic arcade games, with Asteroids and Snake being my time-wasters of choice. The strange conflagration of being proud of having an early web-adopter status (having programmed Shockwave code in a 1997 computer science course) combined with the throwback to the dawn of arcade games was synonym with the Flash game experience. Indeed, every year, new games reinvent the genre, but their adulation lies with ingenuity rather than technical advancement. A flash game is, by definition, a small, simple game. The most effective games of late, such as Canabalt or those developed by Nerdook espouse the simplicity of early arcade gems with the right twists to make them feel new again.
The flash game empire is now larger than ever. Places like Kongregate or Armor Games have elevated their enjoyment to the level of social media. Yet, as MySpace has shown us, social mediums can be heavily crippled by technical revolutions. The genre has split up into several subgenres; tower defence, launch games, point-and-shoot, etc. It even has a division of self-conscious creations that act as a commentary on the notion of "game" in general. There have also been "art" games, often characterized by soft music, beautiful graphics and pop-philosophical twist endings. But phone apps, steam and console purchases have shown that there are other channels through which small games can prosper. Will we remember this as the golden age of flash games? Or will flash games in themselves be forgotten as a whole, a collective lapse born out of each individual game's disposable nature?
