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There's something kind of awesome about how, in this day and age, new vocabulary can be coined by a tweet. You've probably heard by now of the "friendslop game:" take PEAK, R.E.P.O., Lethal Company, or Among Us. Wikipedia defines friendslop as follows:
"[...] a subgenre of cooperative video game that focus on a low barrier of entry and social interaction. Created as a portmanteau of "friend" and "slop", [sic] these social games tend to be low-budget, low-cost indie games intended to attract entire friend groups to purchase copies to play together online."
Nothing puts the recency of the field of video games into perspective as much as the irrevocable fact that this subgenre could not have existed without its sociopolitical context. Taking Among Us as the first true (or, at least, popular) friendslop game kind of puts this into perspective. I'm immensely interested in how the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the way people around the world engaged with the internet and digital media, and this is a great case study for that.
Multiplayer video games are certainly nothing new. They've been around since the beginning, starting at arcade cabinets before jumping to home consoles with shared controllers. But friendslop is set aside from the typical multiplayer game by the very nature of that multiplayer engagement. Friendslop is what it is, and works how it does, because players do not share the same physical space. Friendslop games rely on that wireless connection, using the game itself to bridge that gap. It's about playing with the artificial feeling of connection we get when we are virtually in the same digital space as our peers. During the pandemic, this form of connection was invaluable, and it's why Among Us exploded in popularity in 2020.
It's no wonder that following such a drastic social shift in the world, these types of games would stick. Though of course we are now able to go back to playing in-person with our pals, there's something simple and comforting about hopping into #vc and booting up a game or two of PEAK with the boys. It's accessible, it's familiar, and it's something you can do from anywhere, no carpool coordination required. It goes hand-in-hand with the rising prominence of Discord as a platform for the average person. I had Discord for very specific purposes in 2019, and that was as someone who already spent a lot of time engaging with people on other online platforms. But through using Discord servers for courses and group chats in university, I noticed more and more people (including those who would otherwise not have been as "online") engaging in these spaces. Lines could be drawn to the expansion of fandom spaces from 2020 onward and the repeated commentary I have seen about what happens when "offline people" find and begin engaging with these longstanding internet fan communities. It's a merging of worlds: a natural symptom of what happens when a society at large becomes more and more deeply engrossed in the digital sphere.
Friendslop as a term comes with supposedly negative connotations given how we understand "slop" as it stands alone. The frequent association with AI doesn't help matters much. The use of "slop" is meant to indicate a cheapness behind development, or an implication that it's nothing more than a cash grab. I don't think the former is a bad thing, and I don't think the latter is necessarily true. I'm unsure why the very concept of a game being cheaply made is automatically detestable. If it works, and it clearly grabs an audience, then what's the harm? Is it so bad that a group of indie developers--or sometimes a solo dev--would see success from something simple they cooked up on their weekends? The more these digital engagements bleed into the mainstream, the more the "gamer" side of the equation really sees the "developer" side. Game development as a practice has seen a major boom over the last decade largely because developer practices are more accessibly publicized. It's not a secret practice of wizardry: these are real and tangible skills that you could learn, that you could apply. Why feel threatened by that fact? There are only going to be more and more games releasing every day, anyway. Could that really be such a bad thing? (The discussion of an ""oversaturated"" indie game market is a discussion best left for another day.)
All that is to say: I really love how developers have co-opted the term "friendslop" and used it for their own gain. At GDC this year, there was a talk titled "Putting the 'Friends' in Friendslop: The Story of 'PEAK.'" Needless to say, this freaking rules. I didn't see the talk and I'm not familiar with what it discussed, but the fact that friendslop made it into the title of a GDC talk is nothing short of great to me. In the face of a struggling industry, we are seeing an indie boom unlike anything we've had before. I love the fresh new takes and practices studios like Aggro Crab are bringing to the table. That mentality will save the industry someday; it's already begun.
"[...] a subgenre of cooperative video game that focus on a low barrier of entry and social interaction. Created as a portmanteau of "friend" and "slop", [sic] these social games tend to be low-budget, low-cost indie games intended to attract entire friend groups to purchase copies to play together online."
Nothing puts the recency of the field of video games into perspective as much as the irrevocable fact that this subgenre could not have existed without its sociopolitical context. Taking Among Us as the first true (or, at least, popular) friendslop game kind of puts this into perspective. I'm immensely interested in how the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the way people around the world engaged with the internet and digital media, and this is a great case study for that.
Multiplayer video games are certainly nothing new. They've been around since the beginning, starting at arcade cabinets before jumping to home consoles with shared controllers. But friendslop is set aside from the typical multiplayer game by the very nature of that multiplayer engagement. Friendslop is what it is, and works how it does, because players do not share the same physical space. Friendslop games rely on that wireless connection, using the game itself to bridge that gap. It's about playing with the artificial feeling of connection we get when we are virtually in the same digital space as our peers. During the pandemic, this form of connection was invaluable, and it's why Among Us exploded in popularity in 2020.
It's no wonder that following such a drastic social shift in the world, these types of games would stick. Though of course we are now able to go back to playing in-person with our pals, there's something simple and comforting about hopping into #vc and booting up a game or two of PEAK with the boys. It's accessible, it's familiar, and it's something you can do from anywhere, no carpool coordination required. It goes hand-in-hand with the rising prominence of Discord as a platform for the average person. I had Discord for very specific purposes in 2019, and that was as someone who already spent a lot of time engaging with people on other online platforms. But through using Discord servers for courses and group chats in university, I noticed more and more people (including those who would otherwise not have been as "online") engaging in these spaces. Lines could be drawn to the expansion of fandom spaces from 2020 onward and the repeated commentary I have seen about what happens when "offline people" find and begin engaging with these longstanding internet fan communities. It's a merging of worlds: a natural symptom of what happens when a society at large becomes more and more deeply engrossed in the digital sphere.
Friendslop as a term comes with supposedly negative connotations given how we understand "slop" as it stands alone. The frequent association with AI doesn't help matters much. The use of "slop" is meant to indicate a cheapness behind development, or an implication that it's nothing more than a cash grab. I don't think the former is a bad thing, and I don't think the latter is necessarily true. I'm unsure why the very concept of a game being cheaply made is automatically detestable. If it works, and it clearly grabs an audience, then what's the harm? Is it so bad that a group of indie developers--or sometimes a solo dev--would see success from something simple they cooked up on their weekends? The more these digital engagements bleed into the mainstream, the more the "gamer" side of the equation really sees the "developer" side. Game development as a practice has seen a major boom over the last decade largely because developer practices are more accessibly publicized. It's not a secret practice of wizardry: these are real and tangible skills that you could learn, that you could apply. Why feel threatened by that fact? There are only going to be more and more games releasing every day, anyway. Could that really be such a bad thing? (The discussion of an ""oversaturated"" indie game market is a discussion best left for another day.)
All that is to say: I really love how developers have co-opted the term "friendslop" and used it for their own gain. At GDC this year, there was a talk titled "Putting the 'Friends' in Friendslop: The Story of 'PEAK.'" Needless to say, this freaking rules. I didn't see the talk and I'm not familiar with what it discussed, but the fact that friendslop made it into the title of a GDC talk is nothing short of great to me. In the face of a struggling industry, we are seeing an indie boom unlike anything we've had before. I love the fresh new takes and practices studios like Aggro Crab are bringing to the table. That mentality will save the industry someday; it's already begun.
