To my parents’ surprise, I wasn’t to be found glued to our television screen playing Sonic Heroes on the morning after my eighth birthday. The PlayStation they had bought a year earlier sat unoccupied on an island inhabited by sporadically placed video games and DVD cases. It was cold, unlit, and topped with dust: all signs that I’d decided its service was conclusive and was planning its retirement to the storage room. They stood in silence for a moment, as though marvelling at the speed at which tween interests transform and mature. They were beginning to relate this phenomenon to their own humble childhoods when a militaristic all-American accent boomed the F-bomb from the basement.

 

I dragged the cursor wildly in search of the volume scale. On my screen, Commander Stick paralleled the same desperation in his own unique circumstances by hurling an empty clip of ammo at an incoming wave of hipster ninjas.

 

I‘d discovered flash games.

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Flash games couldn’t be compared to any game on the PlayStation. The lack of a conventional corporate oversight on websites such as Newgrounds.com allowed for a true sandbox of user content that rivalled the long-established brands that had dominated for years. But technical nuances and marketing rivalries didn’t occur to eight-year old me. Between the twinkling pixels

and millions of clumsily assembled media on my screen, a shoot of freedom sprung within me and aligned with the tween ache to finally grasp at my own place in culture.

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I have strange memories of Newgrounds.com. The capricious nature of its users (and by extension, its content) make it difficult to associate with a fixed goal, ideology, or even underlying psychology. One end of the website would feature games encouraging the use of basic arithmetic; another would attempt to shock you with animated Transformers ___. While it’s true that these flash games meant different things for different people, I can’t pretend the unifying factor was anything but an respectively induced sense of angst. Angst towards a job, angst towards modern politics, angst towards helicopter parents. Enough collective angst to spur a motley team of computer programmers into designing games around enacting a breakdown at work or eloping from your parents’ house with your girlfriend. These extreme realities existed because their truer and truncated counterparts were too much to bear: a concept addicting to deviant teenagers and revolutionary to eight-year olds such as myself.

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In spite of all the angst, participating in the internet at this particular place and time felt very special. You could rouse admiration in any comment section, in any public forum; there was a magnificent shared sense that we were enlightened. Each day, our games would emerge victorious over boredom and banality. We protected ourselves with layers upon layers of satire, riding the tip of a tangential wave just above the rest of the world.

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I found this difficult to express to my parents.

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Eleven years went by, and I was working on some of my schoolwork. Flash games were a thing of the past. Introspection and real-life experience had taught me to be more open minded: a practice that was often dismissed in communities like Newgrounds.com in favour of more immediate satisfaction. High school and university occasionally brought me into contact with people who were still deeply embedded in the community and measured their self-worth in proportion to their online status. It was with these types of individuals that I would feel a sizable opportunity for friendship, as we would often share the same sense of humour and more or less the same hobbies and interests. As our relationship evolved, though, I would realize there was a concerning overlap between what eight-year-old me once considered to be satire and the views that shaped my friend’s genuine perception of the world. Their angst had built up during the same years where I had opportunities to deal with mine healthily, and now projected itself into advanced forms of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. In the position of someone who had a fairly good understanding of the source of their prejudice, I was the person most capable of driving them out of it.

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Yet I didn’t.

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I was intimidated by the suggestion that I could’ve turned out as the same person as my friend – radicalized by the internet and utterly convinced of their innate superiority. When I could no longer tolerate this notion or the worldviews of my friend, I simply drifted away.

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In terms of my schoolwork – I was struggling with it. I did what I always do to cope with any school-induced stress: open and close Youtube. I opened a tab and scanned the trending videos. Uninterested and still stressed, I closed the tab and opened a new one. No difference. I opened another, and this time, one of the videos caught my eye – “Flash Player Removed December 2020” – and to the left – “All Your Flash Games Are Going Away.” I closed that tab as well, but rather than reopening another one, I typed Newgrounds.com into the search bar and clicked on the combative expression of Commander Stick.

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A part of the community still exists in some areas of the internet, often unconsciously. If you know what you’re looking for, you can go to any game site and just about see where our wave finally fell into the rest of the water.

I pressed the mute button.