Newgrounds

Newgrounds is an American entertainment website founded by Tom Fulp in 1995¹ and owned by Newgrounds.com, Inc. The site hosts user-generated content such as interactive games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. In the 2000s, Newgrounds played an important role in Internet culture, and in Internet animation and independent video gaming in particular. It has been called a "distinct time in gaming history", a place "where many animators and developers cut their teeth and gained a following long before social media was even a thing", and "a haven for fostering the greats of internet animation".

Newgrounds is an American entertainment website founded by Tom Fulp in 1995 and owned by Newgrounds.com, Inc. The site hosts user-generated content such as interactive games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. In the 2000s, Newgrounds played an important role in Internet culture, and in Internet animation and independent video gaming in particular. It has been called a "distinct time in gaming history", a place "where many animators and developers cut their teeth and gained a following long before social media was even a thing", and "a haven for fostering the greats of internet animation". ==Content== User-generated content can be uploaded and categorized into one of the site's four web portals: Games, Movies, Audio, and Art. A Movie or Games submission undergoes the process termed "judgement", where it can be rated by one user (from 0 to 5 stars) and reviewed by other users. The average score calculated at various points during judgment determines if whether the content will be "saved" (added onto the database) or "blammed" (deleted with only its reviews saved in the "Obituaries" section). Since Adobe Flash Player was shut down on most browsers by late 2020, Newgrounds uses the Ruffle emulator, an Adobe Flash emulator written in Rust and sponsored by Newgrounds along with other popular sites like Cool Math Games and Armor Games. In 2022, Ruffle supported most Flash content written in ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and only a select few Flashes written in 3.0, which meant to play then unsupported content, users had to use the "Newgrounds Player", the site's previous downloadable Flash end-of-life solution which it used prior to Ruffle for playing content. Art and Audio are processed using a different method called "scouting", which the site describes as "a way to vet users and weed out spam, stolen works, low quality submissions, etc." All users can put art and audio onto their own page, but only those that are "scouted" will appear in the public area. Like the judgment system, it stops stolen content, spam, or prohibited material reaching the public area, relying on users and site moderators. Once an individual is scouted, they are given the privilege to scout others, though users caught scouting other users who regularly break the site's terms of service and/or guidelines ("abusing the system") get unscouted themselves. Content and context are liable to be reported for review to the moderators and staff members by flagging it for violations to the site's guidelines. A weighted system recognizes experienced users and gives their flag more voice. Newgrounds' homepage includes featured submissions from each category, as well as awards and honors to users whose submission that fall under the site's requirements to earn them. Members of Newgrounds also organize animations called "collabs" through the discussion forum on the site. Some scholars noted that while hundreds of these "collabs" are produced every year, only 20% are completed due to stress on those making the animations, while other scholars said that animators maintain a "strong sense" of authorship and ownership of what they produce, especially solo animators. Matt Jolly, known by his internet alias Krinkels, has been posting violent Madness Combat cartoons to Newgrounds since 2001. On the annual "Madness Day", users upload their own animated content inspired by Jolly's series, and Jolly selects his favorites during his YouTube streams. He describes the day as "like a second Christmas" for him. ==History== ==References== ===Citations=== ===Sources===

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377991077 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.