With our generation’s then-limited access to electronic devices, we were either on QZone (QQ空间) planting and stealing vegetables, or mining gold through a browser window.

The secret sauce that amped up my weekly 45-minute dose of happiness.īefore the rise of the mobile game, browser and PC games were everything. Clearly, in this scenario, I had to get as much as possible out of this rare encounter with the web. Before my family bought our first home PC in 2005, this 45-minute class was my sole access to computers and the internet. In elementary school in the early 2000s, our weekly “computer class” was the highlight-all kids wore their shoe covers to attend it. Zoe: Web games are Chinese millennials’ shared memories. To paraphrase the writer David Stubbs, maybe the games of the past carry not just a glow of nostalgia, but “ possible dormant futures that have merely been deferred.” In this episode, Zoe unpacks the legacy of Flash games in China, and speaks to the historians and vloggers preserving them-as heritage, as memory, and as signposts to a different kind of internet. Their wild creativity (and rapacious piracy) was also a glimmer of what an open Chinese web might have looked like. The experimental playground they pioneered was a gateway into gaming for thousands of designers, coders and illustrators. It enabled people like me, a 10-year old on screeching dial-up connections in India, to follow a Beijing-based animator’s work through email-chain forwards and dodgy links.įlash and browser games are often seen as marginal to videogame histories, but the Flashers in China created shared memories for an entire generation. It’s hard to overstate how magical this aspect of the early web was.

I didn’t know it then, but Xiao Xiao was a breakthrough hit of China’s so-called “Flasher Generation,” a rag-tag assemblage of young designers, illustrators and animators in the early 2000s who were using the then-new Flash platform to create games and craft weird experiments. It was the kind of mysterious oddity the web seemed built for, a proto-meme distributed like xeroxed zines via downloadable Adobe Flash files. This was the mid-2000s, and every Xiao Xiao drop, provenance unknown, came with immense anticipation.

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