By this time everyone who hasn't been living in a cave knows about the infamous boot tossing at President Bush by an Iraqi journalist the other day. However you feel about the President and how the country was run under his administration, one thing you have to say for Mr. Bush, he's got great reflexes

Totally unconnected to the specifics of the incident, what I find interesting in its fallout is the way web-based flash games continue to take over the satirical role that political cartoons once filled. (see the games of the '08 presidential elections post). Our country has a rich and scathing history of political satire in cartoon form in newspapers and magazines and anyone who noticed how fast the Bush's Boot Camp flash game, as well as others like Sock and Awe, Flying Babush and Can You Throw a Show at Bush popped up on the Web after the footwear was flung on Monday, should be able to acknowledge the potential for this in flash technology. The games are certainly is no works of art, but they were not designed to be awe inspiring. They were instead designed to capture the moment, and immortalize it from a particular point of view that people in this particular time can appreciate, or at least recognize. In a hundred years will anyone sitting where we are now really know why the United States was in Iraq, much less why in the last days of his administration the sitting president of the US was a target for a shoe two shoes? Terrorism, freedom, oil, post Cold War posturing, bad decision making, unacceptable collateral damage, all of these, none of these? Who knows. By that time seemingly mortal wounds will have healed and there will have been so many other crisises around the world that the actual history of our entire period will have been skewed to fit within a few paragraphs in a high school text book. What will remain though for those willing to look a little deeper will be a series of quaint bits of code that historians and/or game nerds of the day will explain were what the people of our time referred to as, 'flash games.' On figuring a way to duplicate our primitive input methods, nobody in these future days will understand why they were called flash games, since by then they will certainly seem the antithesis of that. They will be equally puzzled by this whole shoe tossing bit. But again, just like the satirical editorial comics of our own past, these snippets of code will offer a window into the past and individually conceived past moments that it consists of. Somehow I find it comforting to be reminded that for all the self-gratifying next-gen, core duo, bla-bidy-bla, that our little gaming habit tends to revolve around, that it is all just part of a media continuum that stretches forward and back further than we know.

Don't believe me on this whole continuum thing? Take a look at this image of a political cartoon from an 1861 issue of Vanity Fair. At first glance can you identify what pressing issues of the day and our own are being referenced? It seems nonsensical at first, but with a little digging, a fairly clear picture of what is being editorialized, and in what context, can be guessed at. Like I said, some day someone will be doing the same with these shoe flash games, so backup your files and game on! Hit this link and scroll down just a bit for some brief info on this political cartoon.

--Hobson's Choice

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