Flash

How Flash rose and fell as the world's most ubiquitous yet divisive software platform, enabling the development and distribution of a world of creative content.

Adobe Flash began as a simple animation tool and grew into a multimedia platform that offered a generation of creators and innovators an astonishing range of opportunities to develop and distribute new kinds of digital content. For the better part of a decade, Flash was the de facto standard for dynamic online media, empowering amateur and professional developers to shape the future of the interactive Web. In this book, Anastasia Salter and John Murray trace the evolution of Flash into one of the engines of participatory culture. 

Salter and Murray investigate Flash as both a fundamental force that shaped perceptions of the web and a key technology that enabled innovative interactive experiences and new forms of gaming. They examine a series of works that exemplify Flash's role in shaping the experience and expectations of web multimedia. Topics include Flash as a platform for developing animation (and the “Flashimation” aesthetic); its capacities for scripting and interactive design; games and genres enabled by the reconstruction of the browser as a games portal; forms and genres of media art that use Flash; and Flash's stance on openness and standards―including its platform-defining battle over the ability to participate in Apple's own proprietary platforms. 

Flash's exit from the mobile environment in 2011 led some to declare that Flash was dead. But, as Salter and Murray show, not only does Flash live, but its role as a definitive cross-platform tool continues to influence web experience.

In the late 1990s, a unique piece of software was released for the Sony PlayStation by ASCII. Simply called RPG Maker, it was the English-language localization of the third entry in Japan’s RPG Tsukuru series. RPG Maker wasn’t a game so much as a platform for the creation of other games, specifically those in the vein of early 1990’s Japanese-style role-playing games. Due to the platform’s technical issues, mainly the lack of direct internet access and the storage limits of Sony’s proprietary memory cards, RPG Maker presented the amateur game developer with many hurdles to overcome in the creation of anything interesting and unique. Not long after its release, small communities of RPG Maker users sprung up around online forums such as GameFAQs or RPG Maker Pavilion. These communities gave budding developers an opportunity to share their work with each other. Using a third-party peripheral for the PlayStation called a “DexDrive,” creators could image their memory cards and share these files online, files that users (usually fellow creators) could download and flash onto memory cards of their own to play. Due to the limitations set by the PlayStation’s memory card format, games made with RPG Maker had to use the common elements: 68 character sprites each with four color palettes, 99 enemy battle sprites, 127 map objects, et cetera, were stored on the CD-ROM. Although custom graphics could be made using an included editor, only nine new character sprites could be imported per game. Likewise, interactivity was nearly identical among RPG Maker games. Because the battle system could not be customized, most games created on the platform played similarly to one another. The main thing that distinguished each creation was narrative: While RPG Maker games tended to look and play the same, each told a unique story, and some of them did this in surprising ways. This paper is intended to represent the preliminary steps towards a study of RPG Maker as a historical platform for amateur electronic literature. The platform’s technical affordances and limitations will be discussed, focusing on Sony’s memory card format and its odd method of data storage. The DexDrive, an unlicensed peripheral that allowed users to create and share images of these memory cards, will also be examined, as will a few of the communities that this technology helped foster. Several examples of works created with RPG Maker will be examined in detail: "SILENT VOICES" by David Vincent, an example of a work made entirely with default game elements; "Man Getting Hit in the Groin By a Football RPG featuring Ernest Borgnine" by MisledJeff, a short comedy piece that doesn’t feature any direct interactivity (but, as the name suggests, does feature Ernest Borgnine taking a football to the groin); and the presenter’s own RPG Maker e-lit piece, "The Days at Florbelle", a recreation of a lost work by the Marquis de Sade.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

As a new media author, I write the visible, readable text (texte-à-voir *) and the underlying source code, the program (texte-auteur *). As a new media artist, I also design and create the user interface and the multimodal elements - the whole thing.

Since starting to write and create in new media, I have felt compelled, by the digital medium itself, to attempt to fully exploit the affordances of programmable media for expressivity by employing non-linear narrative methods, non-trivial interactivity and random programming in poetically and/or narratively meaningful ways. This has led me to create, what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls, playable media works.

Writing creatively for algorithmically-driven media, working with others’ code frameworks and writing my own programs has led me to consider the expressivity of game processes and, consequently, my work has taken on more game-like characteristics. I’d like to trace this development by presenting a selection of extracts from key works (listed below) which demonstrate this move towards writing for playability.

The key Electronic Literature works:

Fitting the Pattern ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html )
Underbelly ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/underbelly.html )
Out of Touch, an ongoing series ( http://www.crissxross.net/oot/indexoot.html )
Rememori ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/rememori.html )

*Philippe Bootz, Towards an ontology of the field of digital poetry

Digital literature authors — particularly those of an experimental bent — are frequently obliged to use multimedia environments whose longevity is questionable at best. When support for such an environment on a new platform is not available, portation of the work may be the most direct strategy for making the work available. An excellent example of such a platform was Hypercard — only available on Macintosh MacOS Classic (and emulators). This paper discusses my experiences in porting Intergrams from Hypercard — first to Windows in 1996, and more recently to Squeak, where it will run on a wide range of platforms. Following on the pioneering recommendations of “Acid Free Bits”, the paper explores the following issues: (1) ability and desirability of digital literature authors to create their own file formats that are open, human-readable, and serve as “texts of description” (in the spirit of Bootz) whose preservation is assured by the simplicity and openness of the file format (as opposed to closed proprietary undocumented file formats often found with multimedia environments). (2) The importance and desirability of using multimedia environments which allow for self description. This allows the texts of description in the author’s own file format to be generated by a single piece of code that can export any number of the author’s works. (3) The importance and desirability of using open source environments to deal with novel user interface challenges, such as the apparent lack of mouseovers in touch-screen environments. (4) Popularity of web development environments does not provide an automatic avenue of escape, as can be seen in the recent issue of collapsing support for Flash. Just because “it runs in the browser!” does not mean there are any fewer preservation issues than for older proprietary stand-alone environments.

(Source: Author's Description)

This essay that consists from a number of self-contained segments looks at the phenomenon of Flash graphics on the Web that attracted a lot of creative energy in the last few years. More than just a result of a particular software / hardware situation (low bandwidth leading to the use of vector graphics), Flash aesthetics exemplifies cultural sensibility of a new generation. This generation does not care if their work is called art or design. This generation is no longer is interested in "media critique" which preoccupied media artists of the last two decades; instead it is engaged in software critique. This generation writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media. The result is the new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows: Bauhaus design in the service of information design. Instead the Baroque assault of commercial media, Flash generation serves us the modernist aesthetics and rationality of software. Information design is used as tool to make sense of reality while programming becomes a tool of empowerment.

(Source: Author's abstract)