Flash, Newgrounds and the confluence between the story of the Internet and video games

Abstract

The explosion of creative spaces sparked by the unexpected aperturism brought about by the explosion of the internet in the 2000s brought new ways to study the social behavior of small groups. Specifically, it offered innovative perspectives to observe how individuals constitute communities that are based on common interests and sustain themselves over time. The fact that many of these communities established their jargon from texts generated by multinational industries makes them especially interesting as they reflect the behavior of a sizable portion of consumers in a late capitalist context. Since most of the works generated by these groups are satirical or parodic, their sphere of influence does not usually spill over the spaces that generate them, with the exception of a few viral cases. Today, the expansion of the Internet through social networks and content platforms like YouTube has turned some of these texts into lingua franca among users, and have been consequently instrumentalized by some companies and marketing agencies. Along the way, a portion of these communities has ended up disappearing mitigating their presence. Of the ones that survive, many rely on expressive tools such as Flash, which was expressly conceived to generate dynamic web pages but has also proven useful for animation and video games. This made the program foundational for the early constitution of the Internet. This article will examine the relationship between the expressive movements that animated some of the most dynamic communities on the Internet in the mid-2000s and the Flash engine, with a special emphasis on interactive experiences.