Memory archive Notes from a browser-era car park

As I remember it, there was a stretch of years around 2008 to 2011 when the first step of "going online" was not opening an app but opening a web page, and then logging in to a small area that belonged to you. That area had background music, a skin you could change, and a visitor log that told you who had been by today. It sat somewhere between a personal homepage and a social network: you decorated it, and you also maintained it.

In one corner of that area there were usually a few little games. Growing vegetables, keeping a pet, parking a car. What they had in common was that nothing had to be downloaded or installed — open it and you were playing, close it and you were gone. I think that is easy to underestimate now. These were games that put their entrance next to something you were already doing. They didn't ask you to set aside time. They only needed you to be there already.

Our connection at home wasn't fast, and pages took a visible moment to arrive. The waiting became part of it: you'd watch a blank rectangle and guess how many spaces were left. That sense of loading has all but disappeared, and it was genuinely part of the texture of the web then.

One memory of my own

The version I played was the one inside QQ Zone, and I was around seven or eight — so, about 2010. Young enough that what stayed with me is the ritual rather than the rules.

It ran on Flash. The computer at home was an ordinary Windows 7 desktop, nothing powerful, and that was exactly the point: a game like this asked almost nothing of the machine. If the browser had the Flash plugin, you could play. No install, no disc, no waiting for anything to download.

What I actually remember is the checking. The first thing I did when I got to the computer was open my space and look at the car — before homework, before whatever I had said I was going to do. Fifteen seconds, several times a day. I remember the small arithmetic that went with it: roughly when the earnings would be worth collecting, and whether I could get back before one of my friends did. I remember being genuinely annoyed at a friend over a parking space, both of us knowing it was ridiculous, and neither of us letting it go.

It is gone now. The game was shut down, and Flash itself was retired at the end of 2020, so even an archived copy would not run in a browser today. That is the precise reason this site is built the way it is. I cannot preserve the thing, so I have rebuilt the feeling of it out of the only materials I can be confident will still render in twenty years: HTML and CSS.

Write the rules of a parking game down and they are embarrassingly short. Pick a car, find a space, park in it, come back later and collect. Other people can park in your space, and you can park in theirs. That's it.

It worked, I think, because three things stacked up:

• Time did the game designer's job. Income accrued with the clock, which meant that doing nothing was also a change of state. Every minute you were away was building you a reason to come back.
• Loss pushed harder than gain. Worrying that your space would be taken, or your earnings collected by someone else, was far sharper than the prospect of earning. I remember setting an alarm — not to collect, but to avoid being beaten to it.
• The cost of acting was near zero. Two clicks finished a round. That let it slot into a break between classes or ten minutes of waiting for someone, rather than demanding you enter a state called "playing a game".

Looking back, the loop isn't clever, and it's a little brutal. But it is honest: every rule is out in the open, there is no recommendation algorithm and no hidden matchmaking. Whoever beat you to it, whoever took your space, their name is right there.

This is the part I find most worth recording. In these games, your friends list was the game map. No random matchmaking, no global lobby — the only places you could go were the places belonging to people you knew.

That produced something unusual: what you did in the game was wired to a real relationship. Take someone's space and you would hear about it in a classroom the next day. Visit someone's page and they knew. A small advantage taken inside a game left a small real residue in the friendship — usually a joke, occasionally someone genuinely put out.

I remember it working the other way too. Because of these games, some connections that had gone quiet were plugged back in. Someone you'd added long ago and never spoken to would park at your place, and you finally had a reason to go and post "move your car" on their page. The function these games served was social lubricant: they supplied a non-awkward pretext for saying something.

That "the map is the social graph" idea was reused heavily in mobile apps later, but the flavour changed. Once friends number in the hundreds and actions arrive as push notifications, you lose the scale of it — a small courtyard where a handful of people you know keep needling each other.

Social networks then were very direct about quantifying identity: levels, icons, decorations, whose car cost more, who earned most this week. The leaderboard wasn't an accessory feature; it was more or less the point. The main use of income was buying a car that could be seen.

We would look at that design critically now, and call it a vanity mechanic. That's fair. But I remember it feeling more complicated than that: in a small circle where everyone knew each other, showing off got a reply. Change your car and someone really would post something teasing about it underneath. That isn't display into a void; it's an exchange.

"Interrupting each other" was also just the accepted mode of being social. Visiting, posting, nagging someone to move, leaving your trace on someone else's page — in today's terms some of that reads as intrusion, but in that context it was evidence of goodwill: you still remember me, you still come by.

These games ran in a browser, and the browser then was a very different place. It was slow, it produced pop-ups, it accumulated toolbars. But it was also linkable: every page had an address you could copy, send to someone, bookmark. Your space was a URL. So was your parking spot.

I remember the visual logic of those pages: dense small icons, borders with a raised highlight, buttons that looked pressable, notices and friends and ranks and a visitor counter all crowded onto one screen. Extremely high information density and not remotely restrained — but with a distinct sense that a person lived there. Today's pages are much cleaner, and much more anonymous.

Then it changed: the entrance moved from the browser into an app, the page became a feed, and the address bar disappeared. It is genuinely more convenient. But something was mislaid — the feeling that this patch is mine and I can arrange it.

Most of those games and spaces have been shut down or rebuilt. They are not like a book or a record: when the servers go off, the thing is actually gone. What remains is screenshots, some writing, and a lot of people's blurry impressions.

I am not building this to restore a playable game — I couldn't, and I don't think I should. What I want to keep is the interface language itself: highlighted bevels, small badges, visitor counters, a footer announcing when the page was last updated. These look dated now, but they record how people expressed themselves online in a specific period.

There is a technical layer too. By today's standards those pages were full of the compromises of their era. This site imposes a stricter constraint on itself in the other direction: no JavaScript at all. Having to produce something operable under that rule forced me to work out which "interactions" in a page are actually necessary and which are only habit.

For what that constraint concretely cost, the manual lists every limitation plainly. To just try it, go back to the car park.