Jay Is Games

» see jayisgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

jay is games was an anglo casual-game cultural layer, not a global one. the audience was largely north american and british office workers killing fifteen minutes between meetings on a flash escape-the-room puzzle, or teenagers on a school library computer playing samorost or grow island. that crowd was not the crowd i was in. in those days, i was at internet cafes in ankara from 2002 through 2005 playing counter-strike on the next machine, then on a university lan after that. casual browser games were a category i could see existed without ever really being inside it.

jay bibby launched the site on 19 april 2003 as a blog with one writer and a strong editorial filter. anyway, for the first decade the model was simple. the site reviewed roughly one or two free browser games per day, with a paragraph of writing, a screenshot, and a play-now link. comments under each post were thick. walkthroughs accumulated. the readership found new escape-the-room games and short narrative puzzles that nobody else was indexing.

the cultural reach was disproportionate to the staff size. wired praised the site for its ability to find the cream of the crop for casual players. slate's justin peters called it the internet's undisputed leader in casual gaming information. small indie flash developers built their entire launch strategy around getting a jay is games front-page post, because the traffic from that post was often the only traffic the game would ever see at scale.

the games i ran on a 2004 pc in ankara were starcraft brood war and ultima online private servers and counter-strike. flash on the browser was a sidebar at university, not a destination. when i saw a jay is games link i would click through, play the escape-the-room for ten minutes, and not come back for six months. the audience for the site was the audience that came back every day.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the editorial pattern was unusual for the era because it was curatorial. kongregate and newgrounds and addicting games were piles, with thousands of submissions a day and an upvote layer somewhere. jay is games did one review per day on average and the post was a piece of writing, not a feed entry. you could read the comments and learn how the escape-room puzzle was solved without leaving the site.

the design competitions were the secondary thing the site became known for. casual gameplay design competition, ccgdc, ran inside the community and helped launch indie developer careers in the late 2000s. a few games that came out of those competitions ended up shipping as small commercial releases. really though, the substrate was always free browser flash, which meant the whole arrangement was tied to a single deprecating technology.

~ the actual end ~

the first shutdown announcement came in april 2016 when the editorial team posted that they could no longer continue operating due to a variety of factors. the wording was understated. a patreon campaign and a partial volunteer-editorial pivot pulled the site back from the brink. tom sykes took over editorial through the late 2010s. the second-act years covered some mobile, some browser html5, the remaining flash archive while flash itself was retiring.

adobe killed flash player on 31 december 2020 and most of the games jay is games had ever reviewed stopped working in the browser overnight. ruffle and the flashpoint archive eventually filled in some of the playability gap, but the cultural moment of opening a jay is games front-page post and playing a new flash game in the same tab was over by january 2021. the daily review cadence slowed through 2022. in october 2023 the team announced operations could not continue, and by december 2023 the archive was effectively frozen while a small mailing list version of the operation took over. the front page still loads, the play buttons mostly do not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »