Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

source: anniversary.archive.org The Internet Archive celebrated its 25th anniversary two weeks ago ( #InternetArchive25 ).  IA began in late 1996, although its web archive, the Wayback Machine, was not publicly released until 2001 .  While there is a lot more to the IA than just the Wayback Machine, our research group's celebration was primarily about web archives, with the 9/11 TV news archive and Flash games collection also appearing.   We asked the members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( WSDL ) to reflect about the personal impact of web archiving on their lives.  This deviates from our regular posts of technical analysis and commentary, though a bit of that sneaks in (we can't help ourselves), and is instead about web archives applied to areas of personal interests and stories.  We also did this five years ago for IA's 20th anniversary celebration , in the before times , when celebrations were in person and not primarily online....

When I was in middle school and high school, I used to play browser games from websites like ArmorGames.com , AddictingGames.com , and CrazyMonkeyGames.com . The browser games that I used to play were Flash games. Since Flash is no longer supported I wanted to learn some of the different ways that someone can play Flash games today.  For the Internet Archive’s 25th anniversary , I wanted to describe some of th e different ways that the Internet Archive 's Flash collections and the Wayback Machine can be used to play Flash games. For this blog post I will focus on Flash games from ArmorGames.com . ArmorGames.com was first archived by the Wayback Machine during 2005. I used the Wayback Machine to go through the years 2005–2021 for ArmorGames.com so that I could find different URL structures that can be used to find archived Flash games, access a game's web page, or download the SWF file for a game. I will also describe some problems that can occur when trying to play archived...