This: “Game makers now have a bewildering selection of tools to choose from—Unity, Game Maker, Godot, Construct, Phaser, and more, many of which share Flash's content-centric approach to development and most of which extend the "build once, deploy everywhere" philosophy of Flash to the modern era. But both McNeely and Fulp argue that none of these can match the fun, simplicity, or ease-of-use as Flash.”

Those last few words are the key to creativity: “ fun, simplicity, or ease-of-use”

What I miss most about Flash is the quick feedback loop, intuitive visual tools, iterative processes, ability to extend with serious code in AS3, and the huge community. It was fun and I’ve never seen it’s match on those features in a single tool since then. It’s made me very sad as it was really cool and supported learning and different modalities.

Did it create crazy interfaces, no, people did. It also allowed people also to create really amazing interfaces, magical experiences, which we don’t see today without a large team and mastery of several tools instead of one.

In short, today, you either have something that is basically a copy of everything else (ala bootstrap) or if you have the money, a large team and careful planning, you have the equivalent of an orchestra and that’s cool, but it’s not what we had before which was more like a process akin to that of Jazz impro - You succeed or fail on your own merits and that was exciting. Similar to how in a Jazz improv, you can start with one guy with a sax and build and build on it, even if you were not an abstract thinker. What do I mean my abstract thinker? Today you have to start with what is possible via code and your visual concept either has to fit that box or it will get expensive/time consuming. In Flash you could build an idea on a small scale, starting with visuals first and for the most part, code and flexibility of the system would support your ideas, one step at a time. Was it perfect, no, but it was vastly more supportive of spontaneous creativity than what we see now in terms of tools.

I laugh when people blame Flash for messy interfaces. Mess is a necessary bi product of human creativity. What we are missing now is that spirit of humanity and creativity.

Flash allowed us to play. I miss the playground.

Play and fun are also integral to leaning.

This quote by Seymour Papert says it so well:

“Seymour’s belief in playful learning remains firmly grounded not only in over 50 years of field research with children in-and-out of schools, but also on the work of seminal thinkers about how the mind works and develops, and how children acquire language and manipulate knowledge; or, to use his language, how we learn to construct objects and play with powerful ideas to the point that we own these ideas as our own knowledge.“

I remember feeling after a month or so of Flash that some aspects of creation within the tool, were “mine” and over the years more and more of the ways of creation within flash became extensions of my mind and creative abilities. That was madly empowering.

Today, when I’m on a large team and we are all jiving, and creating something cool with all of the various abilities and skill sets(designers, front end coders, back end coders, server admins) there are moments when I feel a ghost of the power and sheer fun what I felt using Flash.

If anyone knows of a single well supported tool that brings that sense of joy without a huge overhead of learning, please let me know. I’m dying for it.