I was just rolling over to go to bed around midnight when I decided to post a budding thought I’d been having about games criticism; namely, criticism which comes from “casual” spaces of individuals who don’t entrench themselves in games media or may not consider gaming an enormous part of their lives.

| deeply interested lately in terms like "friendslop" and other talking points or criticism that emerge wholly from "casual" gaming spaces

I was surprised the next day to find “friendslop” had become a contested talking point. Before seeing it stemmed from an article by Endless Mode posted that afternoon, it was confusing, to say the least. Bluesky has earned a reputation since its inception as a retirement home for millennials, home to a very particular subset of the social media sick who fail to understand the sarcasm of even their own age group and who are distinctly unfamiliar with Gen Z. But I guess therein the spark lies.

“Slop” as a slang term fits the Gen Z internet and no other. Originally coined by gaming variety YouTuber Pyrocynical, “slop” gave a name to the YouTube capital-C Content we had become accustomed to seeing at that point. As Pyrocynical himself described, he used a second channel to rapidly pump out lower effort videos easier to produce en masse, “as slop to put in the trough for [his] viewers to consume like piggies.” Think Asmongold or penguinz0 (Critikal) uploading endless amounts of reaction videos with vaguely incendiary headlines like: “The ___ Situation Is INSANE…”; “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING…”; “They can’t keep getting away with this”; “The Most Hated YouTuber”; et cetera.

As derivative and deliberately unoriginal as this content is, often as simple as hitting record while the webcam’s on and reacting to someone else’s work, it does take effort to produce at this scale. This is especially true in order to fulfill the goal of slop: to continuously produce at scale for an extended period of time in order to create revenue. It’s important to remember these tenets of slop now as the term has become connotated with generative AI. While genAI has allowed for a new and unprecedented level and type of slop to flood our feeds, it is not an inherent component of slop.

So, “friendslop.” As previously mentioned, the flashpoint for this as a critical discussion (or perhaps, more accurately, the first accredited publication to write about the trending topic) was Endless Mode’s article “Not Every Co-Op Game is ‘Friendslop’,” written by Bee Wertheimer. This headline is broadly true, as is the title of Second Wind’s eerily similar video “PEAK Isn’t Just ‘Friendslop,’ It’s a Great Indie Success Story,” but the content of these pieces reveals a deep misunderstanding of this term, the games themselves, the conditions that created them, and the community calling them friendslop.

Although Wertheimer is correct in naming the origin of the term friendslop as this tweet, one tweet does not a trending term make. What became clear very quickly in the days and weeks after the tweet gained popularity was that Gen Z gamers identified with it on a large scale. Games media is notoriously late to the party regarding “casual” gamers so you could be forgiven for being unaware, but the term “friendslop” was inescapable from that point on on the social media websites that people under the age of 28 actually use: Instagram and TikTok.

It seems that friendslop was immediately able to capture this group’s attention, finally giving a name to that you-know-it-when-you-see-it, “oh, it’s one of these” games.

Phasmophobia attained overnight success in late 2020 as a shortform-friendly, reaction-heavy, co-op horror game. It was like Among Us on crack, with bigger reactions, a smaller and therefore easier to coordinate group size, and importantly, a much lower and more controllable time-to-reaction. The ghost, as an AI player, adds an element of randomness and removes the element of skill required of an Impostor in Among Us. That randomness is deliberately ripe for manipulation, with several tools at the ghost hunters’ disposal to make the ghost more aggressive more quickly. It echoes something I said earlier this year about AAA, blockbuster games:

| The current, “correctly” designed, blockbuster action-adventure game asks as much of the player as the Fast and the Furious films ask of a moviegoer, which is simply to react to stimulus. See fast car and smile. See enemy, shoot enemy.

This is not a bad thing. Phasmophobia and its sons Lethal Company, Content Warning, and R.E.P.O. are this very essence of reacting to stimulus boiled down to an almost essential form. There is no story or narrative but there is “lore” if you like that sort of thing (that is, narrative which is written to be ignored without consequence). There is no overarching plot or true “main story,” but there are a handful of maps with unique features and tweakable settings, so endless replayability is baked into the game design. That endless replayability is only further strengthened by the inherent randomness of both the game itself and the chaos of co-op multiplayer.

This is but one element of friendslop.

Some of the games’ more technical elements — namely visuals — open the door further. Regardless of one’s opinion on the gameplay ingenuity, polish, or visual style of any of these games, it’s clear even to the layman that they were developed under serious constraints. Content Warning made that obvious out the gate, listing not a development studio but the six individuals who made it and releasing for free on April Fool’s Day. While this marketing move undoubtedly brought more players in day one than the game would’ve gotten with a traditional marketing campaign, it did have the adverse effect of making it look even cheaper. Phasmophobia spent the majority of its lifecycle developed by a team of five or fewer, only beginning serious growth in the leadup to its 2024 console release. Lethal Company was similarly led by one full-time developer, Zeekerss, with a small group of testers and additional contributors. PEAK’s core team was seven.

These games were made with small teams and tight budgets both out of necessity and strategy, with PEAK developer Aggro Crab being the most forthcoming about it as a business move:

| According to Aggro Crab head Nick Kaman, Peak was made "mostly from jealousy." To be clear this sounds like mostly a joke, but for Kaman and the rest of Aggro Crab, this feeling came about when they learned that Content Warning was also made as part of a one-month long game jam, and sold ridiculously well. "It turned everything we know about game development upside-down," Kaman said.

| "At the time we were on the precipice of launching our biggest game ever, Another Crab’s Treasure—an intense 3+ year-long project that burnt a lot of us out. While it was a success, Content Warning was a much bigger one made in MUCH less time." So, Kaman and two other devs at Aggro Crab asked if they could join Landfall for their next jam, conducted in Korea, the latter said yes and off they went.

For most gamers, video games — and especially $8 endlessly replayable co-op multiplayer games — are one small part of their lives, a hobby that makes up a fraction of their total media consumption. Even so, the influence of this business strategy and reason for financial success is easily identifiable, whether the casual gamer gets it or not; and, frankly, I’m inclined to think that they do. “Make it cheap, make it fast, make it fun” is pretty straightforward.

This is where the real divide between the casual and hardcore, the zoomer and millennial, lives. While there is an interesting development here with overtly casual gaming spaces organically inventing a critical term… “Friendslop” is, bluntly, not that serious. It could just as easily have been “friendcore” or “friendlike,” since the co-op, “Friday night with the squad” vibe is the most integral component of the genre. It just hit the zeitgeist at a very particular time, with slop front of mind and these games tipping past the saturation point on video-based social media.

If there is to be a culprit for the open-armed reception of “friendslop” as a genre term, I have to point the finger at R.E.P.O.’s truly fucking hideous original cover art. Nothing could have so clearly communicated, to any audience, that this was slop for the trough like a faux deep fried laughing-crying emoji. Read the comments on anything involving R.E.P.O. at launch and you’ll see the same sentiment over and over again: “I thought it was an asset flip because of the cover.” R.E.P.O. presented itself as slop for the bit and retroactively gave a name to the very trend it was following.