Game Studies

Why Flash Games Still Matter: Re-signifying Minor Platform Creators in Videogame History

Abstract

Although initially created for animation, Macromedia Flash (1996-2005) -- later Adobe Flash (2005-2017/2020) -- was an early platform for creating and playing web multimedia, widely adopted by independent game creators. The platform became so prevalent on the early Web that it was rendered “almost invisible” (Salter and Murray, 2014), and it is still often overlooked in videogame history. This article addresses this gap through a dual case study of two Flash-based game projects: Alienmelon by Nathalie Lawhead and Molleindustria by Paolo Pedercini. Grounded in the theory of minor videogame platforms (Nicoll, 2019) and the concept of Generation Flash (Manovich, 2002), the study draws on methodological approaches from Art History (Hauser, 1965) to analyze the aesthetic and poetic qualities of Lawhead and Pedercini oeuvres. Empowered by Flash, both artists independently learned to code their own games and critically engage with the videogame medium. Rather than focusing on technical infrastructure or procedural mechanics, this study emphasizes the symbolic and expressive unity of each creator’s oeuvre. It points out Pedercini’s use of simulation to critique social systems and Lawhead’s use of a retro aesthetic to evoke the philosophical ethos of the early Web. In doing so, this article highlights how their work expanded the understanding of videogames and destabilized conventional values and behaviors related to playing and making games.

Keywords: minor videogame platform, videogame history, browser games, critical game

Introduction

When videogames became a global phenomenon in the 1980s, they were primarily driven by the U.S. and Japanese industries, seen more as computational products than as an expressive medium. In the 1990s, the field expanded as a creative outlet with the rise of home PCs, the blossoming of the Internet and the spread of independent browser games across the Web. Within this explosion of works, two overall trends emerged. One, alongside the computational industry, steered the audience toward an “emergent hardcore disposition” (Nicoll, 2019, p. 121), people interested in constant action and technical mastery with videogames. As many videogame professionals came from that hardcore audience, the industry created more games tailored to similar people, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle (Anthropy, 2012). The other direction grew on the Web “in response to the exclusionary values, cultural discourses, and gendered subjectivities that took root in videogame culture in the 1980s and 1990s” (Nicoll, 2019, p. 158). It gained momentum in the 2000s in online game communities, where the Flash platform played a crucial role.

It was a time of democratizing digital creation tools, affordances and publishing gateways for diverse and numerous professional-amateurs (Flichy, 2018) who were looking to build their identities, expand their abilities and disseminate knowledge. For many creators, Flash provided this, offering an infrastructure that facilitated multimedia experimentation and encouraged them to think differently about the digital medium. Flash made it easy to develop and export videogames in a format ready to publish and play for free on independent websites. These websites were home to more naïve rather than innovative games -- something common in a community that welcomed everyone, from connoisseurs and professionals to amateurs and curious individuals. These sites were not just pleasurable places to play; they “served as an experimental playground for distilling games down to their most pure and engaging elements” (Richner, 2020, n.p.). A community grew around this, sharing certain practices and values, promoting a participatory culture in the videogame field and creating “a vast reservoir of cultural expression, awash with artistic and political meanings” (Fiadotau, 2022, n.p.). Despite criticism from some computing experts (Nielsen, 2000; Jobs, 2010) and pressure on Flash creators from mainstream developers, Flash remained the leading platform for browser games for more than a decade.

As Flash featured a simplified programming language (ActionScript), a generation of non-programmers who “[wrote their] own software code to create their own cultural systems” emerged. Called Generation Flash, these creators “[did] not care if their work is called art or design” and they were uninterested in time-based media; “their iconography, temporal rhythms, and interaction aesthetics came from games” (Manovich, 2002, p. 10). Enjoying control over the entire production process, from coding and designing to publishing, they created unique and cohesive works that were in line with the “inseparability of form and content” (cf. Luigi Pareyson, 1954). Operating the computer as a programming machine, they experienced “the pleasure of creating the universe from scratch” and amplified users' actions (Manovich, 2002, p. 12). For Generation Flash, “programming [became] a tool of empowerment” (Manovich, 2002, p. 1).

Several Flash games were widely recognized for their originality, but only a handful have been spotlighted by game researchers. One example is The McDonald’s Videogame (Molleindustria, 2005), used by Bogost (2007) to defend his concept of procedural rhetoric. Others include the Flash games cited by Donovan (2010) to identify the remote origins of specific mechanics in the videogame history. However, even these researchers overlooked the distinctive technical and communal contexts in which the cited games were created. And when the Flash game Canabalt (Adam Saltsman and Danny Baranowsky, 2009) was recognized and incorporated into the MoMA collection in 2014, the museum hardly explored the relationship between the Flash platform and the authors' voice to contextualize and enrich appreciation of the piece. Even today, it is hard to convey how huge, diverse and influential the Flash platform was for the videogame field in the 2000s.

Could these remarkable Flash games have been created using only mainstream videogame platforms? How did Flash, as a “minor” game development platform, entwine itself within game projects like those?

Guided by this last question, this article examines two independent game projects: Alienmelon by Nathalie Lawhead and Molleindustria by Paolo Pedercini. Both began game creators in the late 1990s and early 2000s, choosing Flash not just as a tool for learning code or polishing gameplay, but as a primary development platform. They continued to use Flash for nearly 20 years, despite having the computational skills and economic resources to migrate their authorial projects to specialized videogame platforms. They chose the Flash platform for similar reasons. Coming from a background in the arts (not computing), they wanted to overcome the technical barriers and procedural literacy limitations to be able to independently design, code and publish their own videogames. Lawhead and Pedercini each built a unique career in the videogame field and have been recognized as a remarkable professional (Pearce, 2020). Each of them has their style, unique creative processes and distinct socio-cultural context; expressing their poetic and political ideas, cultural references and technical approaches. Overall, considering that Marshall McLuhan’s often quoted axiom that “the medium is the message” (1967), each developer explored the eloquence of Flash as a minor videogame platform (Nicoll, 2019) in their own way, making it part of each game’s voice.

This article sheds light on the importance of the Flash platform for Lawhead and Pedercini in developing videogames and creating an artistic identity. It is organized into four sections: (i) a brief historical contextualization of Flash games; (ii) the theoretical and methodological approaches of the research; (iii) results of the double case study; and (iv) conclusions, summarizing the findings and pointing to future research possibilities.

Flash Games: Origins, Trajectory and Today

In summary, Flash games are games developed on the multimedia authoring platform Flash, or a similar software launched under the shadow of Flash. Most of these games are short (bite-sized), published as a SWF file (a small web format, native to Flash), playable on web browsers with the Flash Player (a plug-in required by many websites at that time), accessible even for people with low-procedural literacy and did not request installations (zero-setup) or payments (free-to-play) (Salter and Murray, 2014). Despite being a proprietary tool, Flash did not require licensing for game publication, nor did it include the company’s logo at its opening screen, which helped the audience focus on the content and reinforced the creator’s independence.

However, Flash was not conceived for videogame creators. Jonathan Gay and Charlie Jackson actually developed Flash in the mid-1990s specifically for animators (Gay, 2007). Despite the rising popularity of 3D at that time, Gay was convinced that some people were still interested in 2D content (Salter and Murrat, 2014). He developed a tool based on animation basics (e.g., the timeline structure, where some frames are keyframes and others tweens) and optimized the process (the tweens could be generated automatically by interpolation). These processes were built to be flexible. For instance, if some tweens looked cheesy, they could be transformed into keyframes and be fixed. Flash interface aligns more closely with image editing tools than with writing code platforms. They were also built with accessibility and innovation in mind, allowing creation of interactive and non-linear narratives even for those working at a beginner level. The tool was released in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator and, in the same year, acquired by Macromedia and relaunched as Flash -- a more generic name aimed at a broader user base. It was used extensively: in the year 2000, there were 500,000 developers working with Flash worldwide and 325 million Flash Players active on the Web (Gay, 2007), or about 60% of web users at the time. Eight years later, Flash Player was installed on 98% of connected computers (Adobe, 2008).

Flash demystified the art of creating interactive multimedia. Artists, designers and other creators quickly adopted it. They invented things like motion design and animated web series -- media which pushed the resurgence of certain drawing techniques (such as flat drawing, now in vector) and animation methods (such as cut-out, now with interpolation). It was even widely utilized in television animation (Cawley, 2006). Gay notes that he was surprised to learn Flash were used to make games: “someone [built ] a pinball game in Flash 2… using only these simple tools” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 24). Listening to his users, Gay reoriented the tool, making it more robust and introducing a complete computational language (ActionScript) on Flash 5. With that, Flash became the biggest game-making platform for the Web and the main gateway into the videogame world in the 2000s.

As an easy-to-use platform, it encouraged organizations to engage with digital media and develop web games to achieve their institutional goals. Museums, broadcasters and agencies created serious games, news games, advertising games and other types of games in Flash, publishing them on their institutional websites. Some of these games had complex narratives, mechanics and art, like Bosch Adventure Game (V2_Lab, 2000), developed for a special Boijmans Museum exhibition (Bahia, 2008), or Get the Glass (Northkingdom, 2007), developed as part of a campaign to promote milk consumption (Bahia, 2021). This contributed to the promotion of mediatic and procedural literacy even beyond the field of videogames, leading some organizations to create programs promoting the connection between the world of videogames and their institutional purposes. One such program was Nubla: Laboratorio de Arte, Educación y Videojuegos, one of the main projects of the Education Department of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (Bahia, 2023). These and other initiatives led countless people, from diverse fields and with different purposes, to develop videogames.

Figure 1. Composition created by Glitched Ghoul (2019) with screenshots of Achievement Unlocked (John Cooney, 2008), Cube Escape - The Cave (Rusty Lake, 2017), Epic Battle Fantasy (Matt Roszak, 2009), and Corporation INC (John Cooney, 2010).

Typically, Flash games were developed by amateur creators and published on independent websites such as Newgrounds (1995), ArmorGames (2004) or Kongregate (2006). Games were published without prior editorial curation, organized by tags provided by the creator, and presented to the audience without undergoing an algorithmic curation process. There were games of all styles, genres and themes imaginable, from sex simulators to Mario zines. These websites were “a successor to the now-mostly-vanished physical arcades” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 64), a virtual playground welcoming diverse people, including those who lacked console access or were hesitant to reveal their gaming interests publicly. As a player wrote:

[In my house] the consoles were noticeable by their absence,... what we had at home was a computer with internet. I don't even remember how I arrived on websites like ArmorGames or Kongregate, what I know is that once I found them, I didn't let them go... We must admit that the boom of flash games, which were cheaper to produce than games for any other platform, gave us an almost endless number of titles. Yes, some were better, and some were worse (and some were terrible, but hey, the E.T. videogame existed, too). Anyway, they were my games, my experience, my story. [free translation] (Ghoul, 2019)

Even Flash versions of mainstream videogame titles expressed more than mere nostalgia; they were “a testament of Flash’s ability to empower individual authors to recreate games that once took larger production teams" (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 44). Flash game websites, forums and repositories (FlashKit, e.g.) were places for designers and developers to share tutorials, editable files and ideas, improving their expertise.

In an ethnographic study, Young (2018) interviewed professionals in the videogame industry and found that most participants attributed the initiation and/or progression of their professional development to the use of a non-specialist tool, particularly Flash. For example, Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee developed Meat Boy (2008) in Flash, publishing it on Newgrounds, and soon after, McMillen developed Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010) for Xbox and Nintendo. Some creators introduced new game mechanics in Flash, which were later adopted by the industry. Such titles include Crush the Castle (ArmorGames, 2009), the first physics-based game created before Angry Birds (Rovio, 2009) (Rigney, 2012) and Alien Hominid (Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp, 2002) which attracted 18 million players on Newgrounds, and inspired The Behemoth, made for the PlayStation 2, Gamecube and Xbox (Tristan, 2010). In the computing field, Flash was a helpful platform for beginners to learn to code and for experts to prototype ideas. Despite holding a bachelor's degree in computer science, Jenova Chen used Flash to develop flOw (Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark, 2006), creating a new “active DDA” (dynamic difficulty adjustment/balancing) adaptable for players' different skill levels (Chen, 2006).

The Flash platform became a “creative and communal platform” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 11), vital in peripheral contexts. By creating Flash games and engaging with their community, Daniel Benmergui was able to build a career in the videogame field: "This combo 'runs in browser + access to the player community' put a beginner, unknown, South American developer [from Argentina] in the spotlight and allowed me to have a career in game development" (Richner, 2020, n.p.). Provided with “this combo,” creators could overcome barriers that were absent in countries central to the videogame industry but prevalent in the Global South (Penix-Tadsen, 2019). In these contexts, consoles, computers, software and videogames priced in dollars were disproportionately expensive. These often arrived late or were accessed through demos, modified versions or unauthorized copies. Moreover, structural inequalities, such as those related to gender, ethnicity and generation, further limited access to videogame play and creation for many individuals who were interested. Flash helped mitigate bias and played a role in starting the videogame industry in non-central countries.

Even so, the Flash platform was repeatedly criticized by computing experts. In 2000, Jakob Nielsen blamed Flash for a “usability disease” on the Web, even though his critiques could be applied to design choices possible on any platform. This attack underscored Flash’s power at the time (Salter and Murray, 2014), a power which Steve Jobs (2010) soon had to confront. Flash found itself amid several ideological battlegrounds: between Android and iPhone, proprietary technology and open source, SWF and HTML5. Initiatives such as the Chrome Experiments encouraged web devs to innovate with design using HTML5 (Ford, 2019) in place of Flash. As Lawhead recalls: “At a Casual Connect talk, one of the speakers said that they don't hire Flash devs out of principle, and people laughed" (2020b, n.p.). A “toxic atmosphere” suffocated Flash game creators.

At the same time, SWF content was declining while mobile access to the Web was rising (W3Techs, 2010). Flash became irrelevant for many, “not because of its functionality -- which had been evolving for as long as the platform itself existed -- but because Internet users’ shifting habits and values demanded something else” (Fiadotau, 2022, n.p.). Social media began to thrive, but Flash seemed poorly suited to the new online behaviours. Adobe, Flash’s parent company since 2005, showed no interest in reversing the situation and, in 2011, announced the end of Flash for mobile devices. They introduced a “new” multimedia software, Animate, adapting Flash resources for changing web technology, and refocusing on animation. When Animate was released in 2017, Flash support was discontinued. Soon after, in December 2020, Flash Player’s EOL (end-of-life) was implemented, and SWF content became unplayable on the Web.

Despite all of this, the Flash platform had a long life (1996-2017/2020) -- a rarity in the tech industry, which is well known for its accelerated obsolescence, emphasis on cutting-edge technology and familiarity with rapid product disposal. It was widely used for nearly two decades, “constantly adapting to the changing environment created by hardware, software, and its own users” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 11). It became a technology as relevant as HTTP:// itself (Ford, 2019) and a tool of resistance against the supremacy of specialist code languages, a kind of “vernacular language” for multimedia (Brower, 2016). Flash was the trigger for the dynamic web known today.

Flash was so prevalent in the early Web that it became almost invisible (Salter and Murray, 2014). However, Flash Player’s end-of-life made it clear that the platform still mattered, even if quietly, to many. For instance, the South African government urgently needed to provide a browser with a Flash emulator so that people could continue using government forms, which had become inaccessible after the Flash Player shutdown (Salter, 2021). Initiatives emerged across the Web to resist the erasure of Flash content, some guided by nostalgia, while others sought to preserve a cultural heritage. People promoted debates by organizing events, such as Gone in a Flash (MacKenzie Art Gallery, 2020) and The Final Flash Game (AMAZE, 2020), and conducted research. Today, we have plug-in emulators of Flash Player, such as Ruffle.rs and Newgrounds Player, as well as online archives of Flash games, including FlashMuseum.org, FlashpointArchive.org, and the Software Library: Flash Games on the Internet Archive. This is an essential effort in the realm of digital preservation, providing materials to investigate Flash as a platform that played a key role in building the diverse, global videogame scene enjoyed today.

Methodological Approach

To shed light on Flash's role in videogame history, this article presents a dual case study. It focuses on two independent videogame creators, which were selected based on eight criteria: (i) Activity in the field: recognized both by themselves and by institutions as videogame professionals for over a decade; (ii) Technological choices: used the Flash platform as the primary resource to create and publish games; (iii) Peripheral context: began their videogame career in unfavorable circumstances (political, economic, technological, social, gender-related, ethnic, etc.) that limited their access to the videogame industry; (iv) Authorship: created a distinct style and expressive voice, recognizable in their Flash games, which were developed and published independently; (v) Critical perspective: criticized conservative values and practices present in the videogame industry; (vi) Relevance: discussed Flash games today not just as an outdated technical artifact, but as a key to understanding the videogame field in the past, present, and future; (vii) Diversity: the creators differ in terms of gender, cultural background, and the topics covered in their games; and (viii) Availability: they have some critical Flash games still available to play (via plug-in emulator or adapted version), along with textual documentation (creator’s blogs, interviews, or talks) and discussions (in academic or artistic publications).

The research was conducted in four stages. Firstly, Flash game authors were sought out at events organized in 2020 to discuss the “upcoming dissolution of the Adobe Flash medium” (MacKenzie, 2020) and the future of Flash games. Two creators met all the selection criteria listed above: Nathalie Lawhead (U.S., 1983), also known as Alienmelon, and Paolo Pedercini (Italy, 1981), author of the Molleindustria project. Both of them have been recognized as independent game designers (Pearce, 2020), have participated in international festivals (such as FILE/São Paulo, AMAZE/Berlin, and IndieCade/Los Angeles), and have claimed that the Flash platform was crucial in their careers (Pedercini, 2020; Lawhead, 2020) -- even though their games were not published on Flash game websites but rather on their own web domains (www.molleindustria.org and https://alienmelon.com).

Secondly, I conducted an exploratory search using Google Search and the Internet Archive to identify games and documentation related to Molleindustria and Alienmelon, prioritizing sources highlighting each project's authorial voice and cultural context. Thirdly, I selected two games from each creator for an aesthetic study (Aarseth, 2007), taking into account the games' socio-cultural, technological, artistic, narrative, mechanical and other aspects. Fourthly and lastly, I evaluated the overall creative project of each artist, analyzing the previously selected games and emphasizing elements of the creator's biography, such as academic background, expressive motivations, socio-cultural references and computational affinities. The goal was not to provide an exhaustive study of Flash games themselves, but to discuss how Molleindustria and Alienmelon can be better understood by examining the proximity of these authorial projects to the values and practices of the Flash game creative ecosystem.

Theoretical Approach

To discuss how the Flash platform is intertwined with these two videogame projects, this article establishes two theoretical foundations:

Flash as a Minor Videogame Platform

Based on Media Archaeology and Platform Historiography, Benjamin Nicoll (2019) proposes using the minor platform concept as an epistemic tool in videogame studies to identify alternative “structures of feeling” (cf. Raymond Williams, 1977). He defines “minor” as “ancillary to conventional narratives of videogame history” and “platform” as infrastructures used in a specific context to “facilitate creative expression within an imposed set of constraints.” Therefore, minor platform users “utilize the ‘platform logic’ for experimental, disorienting, and deterritorializing (as opposed to monopolizing) purposes” (Nicoll, 2019, p. 14). Although Nicoll does not mention Flash as a minor platform, he comments on Twine, which shares a similar history: like Flash, it is easy to use and not originally developed for games but rather appropriated by game creators. As such, I consider Flash a minor platform and discuss how it is embedded in the voices of the game projects examined in this article.

In an analysis of videogame history, Nicoll observed how minor videogame platforms are omitted from historical discourse, leading to a distorted perception of the field: “videogame history is fraught with irreconcilable tensions, contradictions, and ruptures” (2019, p. 21). All cultural fields face this pressure, a constant tension between the dominant (maintaining established values and practices) and emergent (seeking to overtake or supplant the dominant) cultural forces. However, a third force breaks the “dialectic of obsolescence”: residual practices, representing human areas neglected, undervalued and repressed by the dominant culture (cf. Raymond Williams, 1977) (Nicoll, 2019, p. 135). This force is less noisy than the emerging culture, not always in strict opposition to the dominant, sometimes even being co-opted by it. Residual practices do not reinforce the logic of obsolescence and are avoided or diminished in conventional historical narratives. Therefore, studying minor platforms allows us to understand and think differently about videogames in the past, present and future.

As each platform has a distinct ontology and is deeply connected to its context, Nicoll does not propose a unified methodology for studying minor platforms. However, he outlines some effective research practices: avoiding a sole focus on technical infrastructure (software and hardware); incorporating discursive and affective documents; recognizing that programming is not the only means of expressing creativity in a videogame; and exploring unconventional locations and methods (such as talks, notes and images). This approach helps us identify affective patterns and avoid an overemphasis on the procedural dimension of the projects analyzed here.

Molleindustria and Alienmelon from an Art History perspective

As a minor platform, Flash held subversive potential. Unfortunately, most games published on Flash websites reflected representational issues (such as stereotypes of hyper-masculine men and hyper-sexualized women) and reinforced the barriers and inequities of the industry (Salter and Murray, 2014). Inconsistent Flash games, characterized by poor design, weak development and unrefined gameplay, may have been the majority on the Web. B ut their prevalence does not make them the most relevant for a historical study. Therefore, I focus on a pair of consistent game projects, explicitly selected to investigate creators who were critically engaged in the videogame field and aware of the Flash platform’s potential.

This study takes inspiration from Art History research approaches, not from the perspective of “art history as a succession of period styles,” but rather as a lens of individual artistic trajectories, analyzing the creative processes and expressive motivations that shape an artist’s oeuvre (the artist’s body of work viewed as a coherent whole, shaped by recurring aesthetic, technical and contextual elements -- as a symbolic-expressive unity that defines their poetic identity). As often happens when examining different artists from a similar context, this double case study identifies divergent and convergent characteristics between Pedercini’s and Lawhead’s oeuvres, without falling into generalist conclusions about the Flash game era.

Specifically, this research is inspired by art historian Arnold Hauser and the methodological approach he developed to study Mannerism. Mannerism was a “minor” period in European fine art history, chronologically situated from the late 1500s to the early 1600s and positioned between the Renaissance and the Baroque, both of which often capture more attention from art historians. The term “Mannerism” was coined pejoratively, referring to how artists of the time reworked Renaissance styles and imitated Raphael and other Italian masters. As some Mannerist artists sought their own ways to remix and create unique aesthetics, many historians perceived the period as strange and forgettable. However, in the 1960s, Hauser revalidated the period by using a broader historical repertoire. Juxtaposing past and present, Hauser identified Mannerism as a misunderstood innovation (a radical aesthetic diversity within the same historical period) and the origin of Modern Art (a period marked by the pursuit of aesthetic diversity). He interpreted Mannerist diversity as an expression of the uncertainties of that society (social, political and religious). Mannerist artists rejected Renaissance ideals (such as humanism, naturalism and classical canons) and introduced aesthetic heterogeneity into a brief period of art history, employing strategies like exaggeration (evident in, for example, the elongated figures of El Greco) and strangeness (for instance, Arcimboldo's anthropomorphic landscapes).

Like Mannerist artists in the late 1500s, Flash game creators in the 2000s did not pursue a unified style. They introduced diversity into the videogame field, an inconsistency reflecting the uncertainties of the early Web. They brought a significant and misunderstood innovation to the Internet, and still, their work was often met with negative perceptions regarding its quality. Even today, people tend to perceive Flash games as naive or amateurish productions, “simple shapes, sometimes sloppy aesthetic choices, and minimalism for the sake of expediency rather than as conscious design” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 28).

The technical “faults” typically found in Flash games (e.g., the difference in line thickness between vector characters and raster backgrounds) can also be observed in games created on other platforms. But it should not be seen as a fault. Once a game is published, any characteristic, whether intentionally included or not, becomes part of the expressive work and a piece in the “hermeneutic play” (cf. Hans G. Gadamer, 1960) through which the game may be interpreted. Here, we examine the oeuvres of Pedercini and Lawhead beyond the binary of success and failure: the characteristics of their games are understood as part of their expressive voice, and their independent positions within the videogame creative scene are not seen as incomplete professional trajectories, but as an authorial choice.

The Case Studies: Molleindustria and Alienmelon

Molleindustria

In the 1990s, a young Paolo Pedercini created cartoons, published political fanzines, and performed in an anarcho-punk band in Milan. Realizing that he was only reaching people who already shared his worldview, he transitioned to the videogame medium in 2003. He was aware that a videogame is never just a game; it always has political implications. Yet, unlike books, plays, or films familiar to him, he had not seen videogames used to challenge the establishment. So, he founded the project Molleindustria -- a peculiar name, from the Italian words “mole” (soft) and “industria” (industry) -- and built an interprofessional career as an artist, videogame creator and educator. In 2007, Pedercini emigrated to the United States, where he now teaches experimental game design, creative coding and animation as an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

With Molleindustria, Pedercini aims to create “socially conscious” games that critique prevalent behaviours in capitalist society and challenge mainstream commercial videogames (Pedercini, 2020). He was inspired by his cultural background: "twenty years of pervasive, idiotic pop culture" when Italy’s videogame industry was not yet established (Pedercini, 2016, n.p.). He took that immature media moment as an opportunity, mindful that when people have no clear expectations, you can create anything. He started to create games as “artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment” (Pedercini, 2021, n.p.), publishing them on his website.

The Flash platform was the perfect framework to bring this project to life, not just as a stepping stone to enter the videogame industry, but as a minor platform (Nicoll, 2019) used for experimental purposes and in opposition to monopolizing media tendencies. Pedercini developed an alternative approach and designed videogames that were parodies resembling mass media products, which placed the player in a familiar situation (that simulated a social or economic system) and promoted an enjoyable yet thought-provoking experience. He simulated cultural systems and raised awareness of ideologies, highlighting how cruel or nonsensical these systems were.

My assumption is that it is easier to understand an intricate web of cause-and-effect relations by manipulating a playable model rather than reading its description in linear text. Playing a video game is mostly the same as understanding its mechanics. The hope is to use them as "cognitive maps" (after Fredric Jameson), as tools that help us think about the social or economic system we inhabit. Role-play. (Pedercini, 2016, n.p.)

Like many artists of Generation Flash (Manovich, 2002), Pedercini became a developer without a computing background. He studied New Media Art at the Brera Academy in Italy, and after moving to the United States, he studied Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Pedercini, 2016; 2007). His creative-political ideas were also influenced by Net.art, the Situationists and Guy Debord. But it was Flash’s accessible workflow and collaborative ecosystem that enabled him to start coding his own games. Pedercini said to Richner, “It allowed me to start from simple animations, and gradually add more complex gameplay release after release. I still miss its timeline-based logic, IDE, and sharp vector rendering” (2020, s.p.).

Flash was “the perfect gateway drug” that kept him making videogames and publishing them independently. He developed his critical games and published them immediately on the web, operating outside the barriers of the entertainment industry (Pedercini, 2020). The process was so fast that he “could make a game responding to an urgent issue in a matter of days and immediately make it accessible to an audience of millions” (Richner, 2020, n.p.). Over the course of two decades, he released dozens of games. His games focused on specific topics within capitalist society, provoking reflection on prevalent and problematic behaviours. Such titles included Tuboflex (2003), a game about alienation and labour precariousness as a result of working to the demand of the market, Phone Story (2011), a game about the socio-environmental consequences of the computational industry, and Unmanned (2012), a game about the dehumanization and psychological impact of modern warfare.

Pedercini overcame the barriers of his technological limitations through various strategies, including creating mods (modifications of commercial videogames). This strategy streamlines the game design and development process by replicating, simplifying, and redesigning key elements while presenting a critical perspective on mainstream videogame culture. The creation of mods is reminiscent of “remix culture” (cf. Lawrence Lessig, 2004), which was widely adopted in the 2000s by individuals seeking to learn coding by recreating their favorite videogames in Flash (Salter and Murray, 2014). But Pedercini’s mods are not fan-made modifications (which changed visual aspects such as skins). Instead, he ironically subverts ways of being and living within the world of the game. For example, he remixes fighting games in the Mortal Kombat-style popularized in the '90s, using these mechanics as a synthetic metaphor, "somewhat dry and abstract" (Molleindustria, 2004), to create parodies about polemic cultural disputes. He uses this mechanic (adapting the ActionScript code he wrote, perhaps from editable files downloaded from Flash communities) in several games, such as Faith Fighter (2008), which puts holy figures in combat, or Queer Power (2004), where people do not have fixed sexual attributes or gender roles and the “combat” is having sex.

Pedercini engages openly with complex and sensitive subjects, aiming more to promote reflection than to provide answers. He addresses diverse topics, as was common among Flash game creators, incorporating “everything discussed or mentioned on the web, from popular memes to philosophical reflections” (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 84). However, Pedercini seeks to delve deeper into his chosen topics. Some of his games draw upon ideas from academic theorists, such as Oiligarchy (2008), based on Hubbert's mathematical model that explains the cycles of oil extraction, and Queer Power (2004), inspired by queer theory and the work of gender theorist Judith Butler. Summarizing theoretical approaches is a recurring characteristic in Pedercini’s oeuvre.

Another attribute of Pedercini’s games is their criticism of corporations, which may provoke a reaction. In The McDonald’s Videogame (2005) and Phone Story (2011), he prompts the player to be complicit in the social and environmental costs of the fast-food and smartphone industries, respectively. His critical voice is so powerful that Phone Story was banned from the App Store just 24 hours after its approval, and remained on Google Play with a warning about platform restrictions (Salter and Murray, 2014, p. 139). This game subverts the company's image; it is an anti-advergame (Bogost, 2007).

The McDonald’s Videogame, in particular, mimics the glossy aesthetic associated with fast-food chains (Figure 2) and tasks the player with managing an entire fast-food business: a cattle ranch in a “third world” country, the cattle slaughter, a restaurant that sells hamburgers made from said cattle, and the corporate offices. In each sector, the player must make interrelated choices, such as how land can be used for cattle or soy production, but meat production takes priority. When land becomes scarce, the player must either bribe inspectors, deforest, or seize Indigenous territory. These processes implicate the entire chain of production in social, environmental and political damage. The player finds themselves in an uncomfortable position where even victory tastes bitter.

Figure 2. The McDonald’s Videogame screenshot (Molleindustria, 2005).

As "a particularly sophisticated example of a procedural rhetoric" (Bogost, 2007, p. 29), the game expresses its critical perspective primarily through player agency, not through text. For example, overusing land for plantations reduces meat output and results in criticism from environmentalists, pushing the player to lobby in response. In addition, feeding cattle animal by-products speeds up production but increases risks of disease; selling tainted meat can lead to fines, although health inspectors can be bribed. This game eschews a "dialectical model" to discuss the controversial topic, instead promoting a “multiconsciousness” and a “critical play” experience (Flanagan and Lotko, 2009, p. 5). It does not attempt to persuade the player ideologically, but rather exposes contradictions in the fast-food industry and its social and environmental impacts, presenting a tragic perspective: it is impossible to progress in the game by acting sustainably and ethically (Ferri, 2013). Pedercini often explores concise representations of characters, scenarios, dynamics, routines and values present in society, similar to the Theatre of the Oppressed (cf. Augusto Boal, 1974), the Brazilian participatory theatre method that promotes social awareness and confronts oppression.

Figure 3. Every Day the Same Dream screenshot (Molleindustria, 2009).

Pedercini explores oppression in Every Day the Same Dream (2009), a simulation portraying the monotonous and purposeless life of modern society. With a style completely different from the McDonald’s game, the characters and objects are depicted with square shapes and shades of gray. In this world, everything can be boxed in. The main character lacks expression (Figure 3), living a routine cent red on commuting to and from a cubicle (an office), where he performs work that fails to give him a meaningful existence. He is trapped in an alienating system separating him from nature, social life and other human connections. Every day, he wakes up, picks up his suitcase, turns off the television (the only colorful element in the game), takes the elevator and drives to work. The player repeats this routine daily, with no clear sense of progress. After noticing an elderly woman in the elevator saying, “Five more steps, and you will be a new person,” the player may infer that the goal is to break the routine, which can be done through five actions: walking with a homeless person, petting a cow, picking the last leaf from a tree, going to work naked, and jumping off a building. These actions can be completed in any order. Once all five are done, the character wakes up in the same world, but entirely alone. Returning to the rooftop triggers a cutscene where he watches himself commit suicide, like a recurring dream, before the game resets to the title screen.

There are no interface features in the game to inform the player about their progress. Pedercini could have made the gameplay progress explicit (e.g., by showing a progress bar or a list of completed steps), but he has cho sen not to. Pedercini’s minimalist interfaces speak volumes. In this game, they reinforce the theme of alienation and diminished autonomy in modern society. The game is simple (friendly to low-core gamers) and short (approximately 15 minutes), yet significant and thought-provoking. Players have stated that it gave them feelings of uneasiness and, at the same time, hope (Soderman, 2021).

Pedercini’s games remain relevant, and most of them are still available on his website (molleindustria.org) or on platforms for independent creators, such as Itch.io (molleindustria.itch.io). He even continues to discuss the challenges of distributing independent games. At the PLAY Creative Gaming Festival (Pedercini, 2020), he addressed the contradictions of the “attention economy” after the democratization of creation tools. During his keynote address at IndiCade Europe 2017 (Pedercini, 2017), he expressed concerns about the saturation of the indie scene and the risk of an “indiepocalypse,” asking what happens when we have games without players.

Today, Pedercini is still active. His games have been showcased in art and game exhibitions around the world, recently at Play Mode at CCBB São Paulo, Brazil (2022). There, I had the opportunity to see firsthand just how engaging a 15-year-old videogame, created on this minor videogame platform, can continue to be, highlighting that cultural impact can emerge outside mainstream platforms and beyond commercially driven titles.

Alienmelon

In the late 1990s, the Web became an “arena”: an accessible environment for artistic intervention, especially outside of traditional institutions (Salter and Murray, 2014). Art critics were seeking pioneers of new media art (cf. Reena Jana and Mark Tribe, 2006), artists who used the Internet not merely to showcase images of their tangible artworks, but to develop expressive online works. At the time, Nathalie Lawhead, despite being a teenager, was recognized by art critics for their first online work. Using the pseudonym Alienmelon, Lawhead developed BlueSuburbia (1999-2005), a website inspired by Fantasia (Disney, 1940), Edgar Allan Poe and Tim Burton, which was designed as an animated version of their own poems (Lawhead, 2020a).

Lawhead grew up as part of a refugee family in the United States, having escaped the conflicts of the Balkans (Southeastern Europe). D ramatic stories of escapes from concentration camps, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and cultural conflicts were common in their daily life. BlueSuburbia was an experimental, cathartic project, helping Lawhead deal with this pain and discover a sense of identity within a broader cultural context.

Since the beginning, personal themes and a handcrafted aesthetic have marked Lawhead's artistic identity. Art critics labelled BlueSuburbia as net art, e-poetry, and even a game. Lawhead “decided to start making games, but ones that were extremely non-game-like, kind of rejecting games while still being able to call them games” (2020a, n.p.). As expected at that time, especially for someone with a background in Literature and Media, Lawhead chose Flash as their creative platform, publishing “non-game-like” games on their own website. Over two decades, they have built a professional path that is deeply intertwined with the videogame field. While working in the mainstream videogame industry, Lawhead faced systemic barriers, most notably those related to misogyny. Lawhead (2022a) started the #MeToo movement in the videogame industry in 2017, coming forward about being assaulted in 2008. In describing such situations, Lawhead's ambiguous feelings about being part of the videogame field become apparent -- an ambiguity common among artists with remarkable works, who often feel somewhat distant from the medium that their work is transforming (Vargas and Bahia, 2021).

Lawhead also plays mainstream videogames, but their engagement is marked by a critical perspective, challenging gameplay style that is focused on conquest, competition and completion, as well as game designs driven by planned tasks, mechanics, missions and enemies. Understanding videogames as an expressive medium, Lawhead asks: What do the game designers want to say through these videogame concepts? Lawhead exemplifies their critical point of view writing about their experiences playing the Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar, 2017-2021): “I can’t sit down on a park bench and watch the sunset” and “I can’t pet any dog I encounter, but I can kick any dog”; “I can shoot. I can cause a traffic jam and blow up large amounts of cars… [I can] interact with the world to cause maximum chaos.” Game Theft Auto is an open-world game, but “being part of the world is always just out of reach” since it is only possible to interact with the environment to progress on the story from point A to point B, and therefore, for Lawhead “will not really remember that space between” (Lawhead, 2019b). For Lawhead (2021b), the standardization of mission-based gameplay discourages experimental design and alienates players seeking alternative ways to explore open-world games. Lawhead encourages designers to experiment with non-standard solutions, such as the ones devised by creators of walking simulators such as Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), which feature open worlds with no enemies to defeat and no quests to complete.

Figure 4. Tetrageddon screenshot (Alienmelon, 2008).

Lawhead’s works can be seen as Trojan horses, media that appear harmless but are ironically designed to challenge our perceptions of digital spaces, especially videogames. The first work of Lawhead’s that they themselves referred to as a videogame, Tetrageddon Games (2008), was designed as “a satire of our digital life… the internet in the form of a game, as if your browser landed in the web's version of Ripley's Believe It or Not!” (Lawhead, 2015). Its interface mimics an old corrupted system, while the gameplay reflects early Web behaviors. It features several interconnected minigames that blend poetic and political themes with a sense of ridiculousness, like the Monty Python series. Using animated GIFs, warning boxes and oversaturated, pixelated images (Figure 4), Lawhead presents situations that are comical yet macabre, with characters that are “cute” but strange. Exploring their points in thought-provoking and emotional ways. Empowered by Flash, Lawhead destabilizes conventional ways of relating to videogames and other computational systems.

Figure 5. Everything is Going to Be OK screenshot (Alienmelon, 2017).

At the time that Flash was being discontinued, Lawhead created Everything Is Going to Be OK (2017). It could be played i n a browser or by running a self-executing file. Each section of the game's map is named Page and contains a minigame, resulting in "a desktop labyrinth of vignettes, poetry, strange fever dream games, and broken digital spaces... beautifully terrible" (Alienmelon, 2017). The graphics are more cheerful and humorous compared to Tetrageddon, featuring a childish aesthetic that contrasts with its scatological narrative. There is no main character, but instead a white rabbit appears on most Pages, where it is cut up, pierced, dismembered and sunk into lava (Figure 5). Lawhead warns that the game is contraindicated for those who "are looking for something small, lighthearted and fun," because it is "a collection of life experiences that are largely a commentary on struggle, survival, and coping with the aftermath of surviving bad things," such as depression, anxiety and trauma (Alienmelon, 2017, n.p.).

Everything… effectively represents the emotional and psychological vulnerabilities of being humans. Alves (2017, p. 92) interviewed people with a history of social anxiety disorder who played the game, and confirmed that players related to it due to its "honest, non-stereotypical representations of social anxiety." It is not just the images that are eloquent, but also the mechanics and gameplay: the commands (click and the arrow keys) and the agency are purposefully limited. Even the “right” actions cannot prevent catastrophes, only delay the end -- on Page 11, if you choose the supposedly “wrong” answer, the rabbit falls; if you answer the “correct” one, the rabbit stays in the same place, but the rabbit will never be safe. Players encounter unpredictable, random outcomes, incomplete or uncertain information, and very few comforting moments, such as the suicide helpline on Page 22. Failure is inherent to the game's rhetoric, and players face numerous ways to fail, gradually becoming aware that they cannot end the suffering. The situation seems to worsen with each minigame, maybe an impression crafted by the accumulation of terrible events. Yet, Lawhead's humor softens the players’ discomfort, encouraging them to keep playing and trying to save the white rabbit.

Lawhead shares their critical ideas on their blog (www.nathalielawhead.com). It is an artist’s journal, an open, reflect ive space, for sharing thoughts, feelings, anxieties, satisfactions and more, presented to the reader as a labyrinth. There, Lawhead expresses enthusiasm for collaborative tools (Lawhead, 2015), their involvement in art projects (2021a) and their concerns about today’s indie game scene (2021c), particularly regarding the restrictions on independent game distribution. Lawhead (2021c) argues that platforms like Steam contribute to the invisibility of numerous creators, and they state, in a melancholic tone, that today’s Internet is “very uniform” and “no longer celebrates its differences.” They express nostalgia for the earlier Internet “not just functionally, but philosophically” (Lawhead, 2021c). Lawhead is also on Itch.io (alienmelon.itch.io), which they see as the only place on today’s Web that still remembers the Flash communities.

Lawhead continues to advocate for game-making tools designed for non-experts. They work to revive “zine culture” and recreate a decentralized videogame field open to anyone wishing to experiment with game creation -- a goal they share with other game creators (cf. Anna Anthropy, 2012). Lawhead developed the open-source Electric Zine Maker (2019a) to inspire and support diverse, critical and meaningful authorial experiments at the margins of mainstream digital culture. Electric Zine is a Flash parody presented as "Powered by Mackerelmedia Fish" (a reference to Macromedia Flash) and (as described in a fictional encyclopedic Wikipedia entry) was supposedly released in 1996 (like Flash) (Lawhead, 2021c; 2022b).

Regardless of which minor platform Lawhead develops their projects on, or where they publish their games, the ethos of Flash remains deeply embedded in their work. As with other creators who grew up through participating in Flash communities, Lawhead “may no longer be bound by the same technology… but that technology has done much to shape its metaphorical DNA” (Fiadotau, 2022, n.p.).

Conclusion

This article deepens the understanding of Flash’s role in videogame history. It utilizes Salter and Murray’s historic study as an essential basis, in addition to other sources that have documented and discussed the origin, trajectory and legacy of Flash. The article presents a double case study to investigate how Flash is embedded in two authorial Flash game projects: Alienmelon by Nathalie Lawhead and Molleindustria by Paolo Pedercini. Using Benjamin Nicoll's study on minor videogame platforms as the main theoretical framework, and Arnold Hauser’s art history sociocultural perspective as the methodological approach, the article re-signifies Pedercini’s and Lawhead’s oeuvres. It covers only a fraction of the vast body of work produced by of Lawhead and Pedercini -- there is much more to investigate, particularly about their partnerships within and outside the videogame industry. Still, the article's findings are significant, as summarized below.

Although Flash is a central pillar of discussion, the focus here has not been on its technical infrastructure or the procedural dimension of the games analyzed. Instead, the analysis has focused on each game project as a coherent whole, to discuss its symbiotic relationship with Flash. Pedercini and Lawhead had backgrounds in art, not computing, and the Flash platform enabled their entry into videogame creation in the early 2000s. They did not use Flash as a shortcut to follow the same paths as the mainstream videogame industry. Both of them built professional careers in the videogame field, across academia and the industry, and have continued their authorial projects up to now. They may not have built their games entirely in Flash; however, their oeuvres reaffirm the ethos of Flash as a communal videogame platform. Mastering the process through this minor platform, Lawhead and Pedercini opened unconventional paths to think and create games, enriching the broader videogame field. They overcame the oppressive face of technology, performing a kind of “technological disobedience” (Nemer, 2021) as resilient users of the Flash platform, even after Flash was targeted as “no longer necessary.” Even so, the significance and impact of technological resources are not determined solely by their developers but also by how users engage with and repurpose them (Nicoll, 2019). This is why mainstream videogame platforms that promote industry professionalization in central countries can hinder development in others. In contrast, Flash, which was seen as an anomaly by some computing experts, empowered many game creators in peripheral contexts.

In his own way, Pedercini discovered videogames as a medium for simulating social systems, synthesizing their values and habits, exposing contradictions and raising awareness about the systems themselves. Lawhead also forged their own path in the videogame field, creating game parodies with a retro aesthetic to evoke the philosophical foundations of the early Web and highlight the fragility of users' beliefs and behaviors in digital media environments. Lawhead’s themes and motivations are diverse. Pedercini leans more toward the sociological, while Lawhead delves into the psychological -- and yet, they both present cultural and philosophical questions of human existence in non-stereotypical ways. In both developers’ oeuvres, the games are simple, but not simplistic -- much like Flash. They do not underestimate the hermeneutic abilities of their audiences and instead actively empower audiences to participate in the videogame field as critical players.

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