Flash Memory: Preserving Web Games For The Future

Description: A tombstone with a tuft of grass with the
symbol for the program Adobe Flash wedged in it at an angle.

Last year, Adobe announced that it was slowly phasing out support for its Flash player plugin, with support ending in 2 years. Most modern browsers are phrasing out support of Flash before then.

That also means that over 20 years of game and interactive animation history could vanish with it. Enter the Archive Team. Ben Latimore writes about the project in a Medium piece, saying:

"... Flash is arguably the largest treasure trove of unpreserved gaming history today... Spanning literal[ly] tens of thousands of games over a period of twenty years, the library of Flash games, breadth and depth, outlives any other game console on the market. 

When your browser no longer has the plugin to run those games, what happens to them?"

The answer the Archive Project has advanced is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, which serves as the connection for preservation of Flash game collections. Latimore runs a discord server for the project here where you can download the current archive, make requests and discuss the project itself.

His Medium post about his effort to prevent thousands of games from disappearing is worth a read, so check out the whole article here.

Listen Up: Spawn On Me

Spawn On Me is a lively video game podcast that puts gamers of color front and center and features some great insider analysis of the gaming industry, both from its hosts and its guests. Hosted by Kahlief Adams (Spawn Point Blog) of Brooklyn and Cicero Holmes of Chicago (or as the hosts put it "coming at you from Brookago!") "Spawn On Me" don't just discuss the usual gamin news, previews and reviews...  Spawn On Me looks at how games and gaming culture affect and shape the world.

The list of guests Spawn On Me has had is very impressive, and each episode is funny, fascinating and insightful. You can follow along via the Spawn On Me website archive or on iTunes via iOS.

Listen Up is an ongoing series devoted to shining a spotlight on podcasts by diverse creators. You can check out all the podcasts previously featured here. If you have a podcast you'd like to recommend, post it in the comments or email me at shawnstruck at gmail dot com.

Retro Video: Classic DOS-era Art Step By Step

For your morning retro-game pleasure, I humbly present to you the following: A video from the wonderful channel "DOS Nostalgia"containing time-lapses of all of the background art from a Sierra On-Line classic "The Colonel's Bequest". Until the widespread adoption of VGA color modes in computer monitors, the designers at Sierra stored background art for their games in a special vector format.

One especially neat thing about this format (at least if you're a behind the scenes graphic design nerd like I am) is that the background screen art can be displayed and drawn in a sort of step by step fashion-- essentially letting you see just how it was imagined, laid out and created by the game's artists. All in all, it's a fascinating peek at the artistic process in an otherwise long-lost game format.

Please enjoy this gorgeous, dark, and detailed art set to the beautiful MT-32 music from the game below.

Knit 1, Pwn 2: Learning Programming Via Knitting Games

Description: Illustration of a knitting work in progress of a heart
pattern using a knitting guide. Illustration courtesy Idea Studios.

Writing for Vice.com's Waypoint section, Nicole Carpenter muses on how knitting has connected her with two things very important to her: her grandmother, and computer programming. It's not as unlikely a connection as one might think, As she explains:

Knitting is an exercise of binary code: knit or purl. One or zero. Knitting patterns—and patterns for other yarn crafts—can be considered some of the first programming languages. 

"Computers ultimately started off partially inspired by weaving and the Jacquard loom," electrical engineering professor Karen Shoop of Queen Mary University in London told Mind/Shift in 2013. "Arguably, some of the earliest programmers were the people making paper punch hole patterns for weaving patterns."

While yarn and its aesthetics have been a part of video games over the years, present in titles like Yoshi's Woolly World or the more recent Unraveled, Carpenter explores designer April Grow's work  on two games that center on yarncrafting as actual game mechanics: Pattern and Threadsteading.

Both games use craft in its literal sense—the act of making something—as well as as a storytelling theme, in a more abstract way. They bridge the perceived gap between technology and craft, a perception that Shoop discusses, too: "I loved the fact that there is a perception—usually wrong—that there's a world of computer (soulless, technical, 'geeky') and a completely different domain such as knitting (traditional, 'female', craft)—yet there is a clear overlap." 

Pattern is knitting as binary made literal, using crochet as the craft of choice. Like knitting, crochet uses patterns. Grow's game intends to teach players to decipher a pattern's programming-like expressions; she wanted to highlight the math, systems, and equations she saw in crochet—the ones and the zeroes.

The entire article is an interesting exploration of the way knitting as a mechanic bridges the gap between technology, craft, code and personal memories. Read the whole article here.
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Bringing Roguelikes Into The Future: Improv FMV?

Wayfarer, a 3/4 perspective 3-d roguelike in development

The rouguelike genre gets its name from the game Rogue, a computer game released in 1980. What set it apart from dozens of swords and sorcery games for computers at the time was the way it guaranteed that no two players would play the same game the same way twice. It used a technique called procedural generation to randomize each dungeon level. This core element of Rogue has influenced games for decades since, from Nethack to Dwarf Fortress and even platform adventures like Spelunky and top-down adventure games like Don't Starve. Often, fans of roguelike games become developers themselves.

The largest celebration and gathering celebrating the roguelike happened just last month, and I found a great write-up from speaker and attendee Josh Ge. In it, he also talks about his experience participating in what very well could be the future of the roguelike-- a game experience called "Bad News".

In an overview of the history of the roguelike, Gamasutra writer J. Bridgman talks about how one game will be blending procedural generation, improvisation action, FMV and the American Old West with Bad News, and it sounds really interesting:

“Bad News is set in a small American town in 1979 that has undergone a century of procedural world generation in the vein of Dwarf Fortress, complete with hundreds of residents who have formed subjective (and potentially false) opinions of the others in the town,” adds Ryan. “The player takes the role of a mortician’s assistant after the discovery of an unidentified body. Set with the task of finding the next of kin to inform them of the death, “the player explores the town and converses with its residents to discover the identities of both the deceased and next of kin, as well as the current location of the latter. Whenever the player encounters a town resident, an improvisational actor performs the non-player character live, adhering to the character’s generated personality, life history, and knowledge. This actor is Ben Samuel, whose earlier professional work includes Hulu’s original series Battleground.”

What do you think, readers? Is this sort of thing part of the roguelike's journey into the future, or is this a digression down a dead-end path?