Make your own game of Paywall!

By now, many thousands of you have had a chance to play Paywall!, the web game sweeping the newspaper industry. But some of you have asked whether you could rewrite its rules — to mess around with some of the underlying assumptions and run the maths your own way.

That all sounded like fun to us, so Jonathan Stray, the journalist/coder who built Paywall! for us, has kindly agreed to share his work, in the form of the original Flash source file (.fla) he created to build the thing. (Jonathan did this in between calls to Jürgen Habermas.) This’ll only be of interest to Flash jockeys and aspiring Flash jockeys, but if you do build something off of the code, do let us know. Here’s the file.

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Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab, which he founded in 2008. You can reach him via email, Twitter (@jbenton), or Bluesky.

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