ourWorld

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

~ the last words ~

ourWorld was a place teenagers hung out after school when the browser could still run Flash. you built an avatar and gave it a room, then earned coins and gems by playing small games. mostly you talked to other people doing the same thing. Seattle studio FlowPlay launched it in 2008 and kept it going for thirteen years, which for a Flash virtual world is close to forever.

this one was never aimed at me. in 2008 I was in my mid-twenties finishing an engineering path in ankara, not a teenager decorating a virtual bedroom. ourWorld belonged to the same shelf as habbo and club penguin, the after-school worlds that middle and high schoolers lived in while the adults were somewhere else on the web. I read about it the way I read about all of them, from outside the age bracket.

The thing that killed ourWorld was partly the thing that built it. it ran on Flash, and when browsers dropped Flash at the end of 2020 the game got clumsy to run and its security fell apart at the same time. FlowPlay had also drifted toward online casino games as its real business. On october 20 2021 the game told players it would close on october 24, blaming, among other things, bad actors it could no longer keep out.

~ the record ~

~ what it became ~

FlowPlay did not close because it ran outta business. it closed ourWorld because the company had moved on to gambling products that made more money with less trouble, and a thirteen-year-old teen world running on dead technology was a liability more than an asset. the studio kept operating. the world it started with just stopped.

~ the day it died ~

four days notice for something people had spent thirteen years inside is not much, and the players said so, loudly, in petitions and support threads that went nowhere. on october 24 2021 ourWorld went dark. it sits with [[habbo]] and [[virtual-magic-kingdom]] in the pile of Flash worlds that could not survive the plugin that made them possible.

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