Ruffle ships a browser extension that loads Ruffle into every tab you open, so Flash sites work as they were originally intended to. It's available for Chrome and Firefox. Safari works if you enable developer extensions and download our macOS app - we have to get into Mac App Store for it to work normally because apparently notarization isn't enough[0].
Did that work on the NYT site for you? Because for me it doesn't seem to, but then I figure you're just replying in general and not about this rock-paper-scissors AI
I did try on Ruffle, but it's a slightly older version, it's possible that either newer versions have a regression or you have a really old extension version.
Omg, it works! Why does this work? It doesn't work on Firefox ~4 on Windows XP with a real Flash player installed, nor does it work on MSIE8 on that system. I tried on the original site as well as on a custom file that embeds just that flash file, but no dice.
I suppose it's worth uploading the swf to archive.org and seeing if it will work there as well. Edit: https://archive.org/details/newyorktimes-2010-interactive-ro... says "failed to download game data" but I'm not seeing a failed request in the developer console. Not sure if that's a problem with my upload or if IA hasn't finished processing it or something. /edit
It's not fully functional by the way: the computer is not being animated at all, the text areas are too small, the score counter doesn't update... but it runs! Thank you :)
As I noted on those issues, this game uses multiple assets, so downloading and playing just the main SWF file won't work. You can play the game by loading the URL of its main SWF file in the Adobe Flash projector, which can still be downloaded from here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20220401020702/https://www.adobe....
https://ruffle.rs/#downloads
[0] It was enough for the old extensions API :/