Online Gaming

In the recent past, I happened to play flash games though poptropica. I've been asked by several people over the last few months about keyboard focus for Flash games running in the browser. Usually, the person asking is quite sure what is going on. All they know is that the game doesn't work when the browser first loads it, at least until they click on the game. Then it works.

What is happening here is simply a matter of keyboard focus. When a game, or any Flash movie, loads in a browser the focus of the keyboard is still on the browser. The "focus" simply refers to where the key presses trigger events. So if the browser has keyboard focus, then the browser gets key presses for filling in form fields, entering URLs or search box contents, or executing keyboard shortcuts.

If the user presses the up arrow, for instance, the browser gets that key press and probably tries to scroll up on the page. The Flash movie on the page never even hears about the up arrow being pressed.
To switch the keyboard focus to the Flash movie, the user simply needs to click on the Flash movie. This is the same for anything in a modern OS. If the user clicks on a window, then the keyboard focus switches to that. If they click on a word processing window, then the keyboard focus switches to that, etc.

Now, you can also perform some embed/object tag and JavaScript mojo to set the keyboard focus. But that is going overboard. You can simply make sure that the user clicks on your game by including a splash screen and a "start game" or "play" or "begin" button. That's good design anyway, as you don't want most games to start the minute the page loads.