Flash games are often cited as one of the things millennial and Gen-Z kids miss the most off of the ‘old’ web. Flash, which could run in a browser window, almost never needed top-of-the-line computer specs to play a game. It could save data like game lives or points if cookies were active on the browser. The pages sometimes had ads, but branded pages (Barbie, Lego, et cetera), often didn’t thanks to a quirk of children’s advertising laws, which limited how much advertising could be beamed directly into a kid’s eyes. Better, any ads that were there had to clearly state they were advertisements, as young children often can’t tell where their game or show ends and the ad begins. This has since been changed – if you wonder why the game pages of the late 2010s were so different to the ones of the 2000s, that’s the biggest reason why! Websites no longer have to separate their ‘soft’ marketing from their ‘hard’ marketing; individual toys could be advertised on the same pages that the games were on, rather than on what was basically a separate site. Of course it was still marketing, but the Flash games were a different sort.
On top of the obvious benefit of being free, which was great for children who couldn’t buy things online without parental involvement, Flash games also didn’t require any downloading, which completely removed the need to scrutinize a download page for whether or not the thing they’re wanting to download is trustworthy or not. Since children are famously not the best about critical thinking, the odds of downloading a virus to the family computer off of a ‘free game’ were very bad!
Flash enabled children to avoid scams simply by allowing them to play games without a download. Today, the closest you can get to the flash game pages of old is something like Itch.io, which is a scattershot of downloadables, browser games, and fairly loosely regulated content that runs on a blacklist system (bad actors must be flagged and removed, unlike Steam’s whitelist system, where everyone must be greenlit). Steam does have free games… but users must be 13 or older per their TOS, meaning that not only are 12-and-unders unable to play without lying, but that if a parent does set up an account for them, they may find things that scare them because they’re 8 and not 13, even if they’re not just settling for using their parent’s account and therefore theoretically could have access to 18+ games until the parent notices. And, also, a parent’s account probably has a credit card already attached. It would take an unfortunate amount of supervision that many parents are trying to avoid needing by using the games in the first place.
The online browser-game environment may never recover from what Flash’s death did to it. But the group that’s suffered the most for it is probably the kids, who have lost a safe place online where social media and advertisements were forcibly kept away. The era has ended, and the web is different now.
Sources: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/game-apps-are-the-latest-battleground-in-child-advertising/
https://www.fcc.gov/fcc-modernizes-childrens-educational-television-programming-rules
