The use of the word “Slop” has gotten out of hand. I’m tired of it. Mind, I have never enjoyed it, quite frankly I’ve found it to be nothing but annoying and reductive. Even when it came to AI. Yet it continues to permeate everywhere. I think the worst instance I have seen its use was with the term “Friendslop”. A term that people derogatorily use towards games you play with your friends that are a little janky and often similar in low production cost.
Now, I’m sure some of you clicked on this article expecting me to talk about how I actually hate Friendslop games, how I find them annoying to deal with or some such BS. Welp, no. Instead I want to talk about how I think the term Friendslop is a shit term that is disrespectful and, overall, just poorly thought out.
First, I’m gonna talk about why I think the term is reductive, then about why I think the term is unfairly derogatory, then I’m gonna talk about why I think the term being used positively is just feeding the use of the term with a negative implication. Finally, I’m gonna talk about how I think we as an industry and a world need to stop with using the term slop in conjunction with other words for anything outside of AI. Because it’s a dumb term and really bothers me. This one is gonna be a damn rant that’s been bothering me for a while and, as I wrote about games I like to play with my friends last week, a list which featured many such “friendslop” games, I feel it is necessary to call out that word and get my rant out so I can move on. Okay. Let’s rant.
The thing about friendslop is that it’s viewed as a way of grouping together games that are based around playing with your friends. It’s almost being used as an actual genre now. But it’s literally impossible to group these games together because supposed “friendslop” games are all frequently very different in gameplay. In fact, the only thing grouping them together is how people are reducing their whole experience down to just being about playing with your friends, as if that’s all that the game is about and there’s nothing more to it.
So let’s take that at face value and look at some of the supposed Friendslop games that people are hurling that word at. First, let’s look at Peak. Peak is a game that was made in a month long game-jam by developers at the studios Landfall and Aggro Crab. They worked together to make something fun and weird and have a simple goal of reaching the top of a mountain. It originally wasn’t going to be updated, but was enjoyed so much, and was so successful, that they decided they would update it for as long as they chose. It wasn’t meant to be a long running game, or a super in depth game, but it ended up being one that was actually filled with strategy.
If you haven’t played it then you don’t quite know what I’m talking about but, for a basic rundown, you have to climb up a randomly generated mountain path through multiple biomes while managing your stamina and other status effects. You come across luggage that you can open and get items that will either help you manage those effects, or actually give you new abilities to be able to make your climb much much faster or even save runs if you end up falling off the damn cliff. It’s a game that is genuinely difficult because of how quickly your stamina bar can fill up with other status effects and how some of the cooler items in the game actually have downsides as well. For instance, one of the cooler items I got recently was called The Book of Bones. It can be used when you are alive to turn yourself into a skeleton. This takes away the constant increase of the hunger status effect but makes you very brittle so falling from any decent height will cause you to just fall apart, because you are bones. I didn’t know that so I tried to test if I would have fall damage and ended up falling apart not long after I got the item. It sucked but it made for what could have been a really interesting strategy to be able to help my friends climb up areas that they couldn’t reach because of their hunger. I could have helped them up by giving them a hand or putting down a rope, it was an item that provided a whole new strategy for playing the game. Which of course I squandered because when I was brought back I was no longer a skeleton, but hey, that’s on me. My point is that this game that is being called Friendslop because you’re able to hang out with your friends while playing it has actual strategy, it’s fun and hard and a struggle, but once you get to the top of the mountain it feels so damn good.
Second, another game that is being called Friendslop is Super Battle Golf. This is a game where you are playing golf with your friends and get to mess each other up by using items scattered around the course that can either help you or hurt them. It’s chaotic and all, but it also has a strategy to it. If you get an item that helps you do you save it until later in the course or do you use it now with the hope that you getting an early head start will let you be the first to sink your ball once on the putting green. Then, if you get something that hurts other players do you use it to take out players behind you as a way to make sure you succeed this round (if the majority of players get to the end of the course and sink their balls the rest of the players have a countdown to sink their balls or get a DNF for that hole) or do you go after the ones ahead of you so you can take them out and get ahead for once. It’s a competitive game, one that is chaotic and stressful and can definitely bring out the worst in your friend group, but it’s also a completely different experience from Peak. It also has far less jank than Peak. So what here makes them Friendslop?
Again, the point is that the only way these two very, very different games could be considered friendslop is if all that makes it friendslop is them both being multiplayer games to play with friends. The problem here is that that would mean that there’s a lot other multiplayer games that are purely for playing with friends that would be included in that definition. Call of Duty recently had a release that was purely a multiplayer version of itself, but that wasn’t friendslop. Halo Infinite has a free to play multiplayer, but that isn’t friendslop. Apex Legends is also free to play, but that isn’t friendslop. Fortnite isn’t friendslop despite it being pretty janky sometimes. Sure, all of these games you can play with friends or alone but you can do that with many supposed friendslop games as well so I don’t think that should be the qualifier. I mean It Takes Two or Split Fiction aren’t friendslop and those require a second player.
Which leads me to a thought that maybe friendslop isn’t actually about playing with your friends, but actually a way to disrespect and be derogatory about indie multiplayer games that have some jank and often some simplistic premises, but still allow you to have fun and in more unique ways than most AAA multiplayer games do. So let’s jump into that thought.
Slop as a term is always used negatively. No one says “I love this AI Slop”, it’s meant in a derogatory sense because of course it is. It’s a term used instead of shit, or trash, or garbage. It’s not meant to be positive. But that fact being hurled at games means that people are viewing those games negatively. They consider them low-effort or lazy games.
Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t low-effort games out there, there’s tons, I prefer the term shovelware for that kind of thing. But the games that people are calling friendslop are games that took effort to make and still take effort to maintain. These games are often still being updated, still being formed and changed, they’re still loved by their community and looked at as a game that provides an experience. None of the ones I have seen are actually low-effort games. Multiplayer games take a tremendous amount of effort to get right, the games I see people hurling friendslop at have gotten it right, why else would they be successful?
Using a derogatory term to describe these games is incredibly disrespectful to the time developers have put into it, even if it’s a game like Peak that was made in a month, or a game like Meccha Chameleon that was made in a similarly very short time-frame. These games have core concepts that connect with people and make spending time with friends fun, that took an effort, it took ideas and creativity. Disrespecting that creativity is just shitty.
What’s more, low-effort games wouldn’t continue to be updated, they wouldn’t have communication from the developers about the future updates in the project, that’s not low effort, that is an effort to be a good developer. I think the term is just a shitty one to use when talked about games that are frequently used for hanging out with friends.
That then brings me to the idea of taking this derogatory word, and trying to claim it as a positive. I’ve seen many try to do that, from those on here and in the games media space in general, to actual developers. I think the problem is that it perpetuates the idea that friendslop as a term should be used at all. It’s not wise to use it positively because it’s a word that is almost always used negatively, to try and change it, reclaim it like a slur, I think is short sited and just...I’m going too into detail about this here, let’s jump to the next section so I can go further.
Okay, where was I...that’s right, when you try to reclaim it you take this word that, for the majority of its use by people is a negative sense, and make it into a boon. You try not to shy away from it. This leads toward more people hurling that word at you. Even thinking they’re right to think your game, or the game you are advocating for, is actually just low quality trash to play with your friends and nothing more.
Let’s look at a game that just came out, Big Walk. I’ve seen some say this game isn’t friendslop because it’s....higher production value? Because it has more to the experience than just playing with your friends? But, as I’ve shown, the only real thing that friendslop means is indie and a game to play with friends. This is an indie game made by House House and it’s all about playing with friends. So how is it not friendslop? Some of the same people I see try to say they think friendslop is a good or positive word seem to not want to assign Big Walk that moniker because they know it still has a negative connotation to it.
This would mean then that even if you think it’s a positive in half of your brain, the other half fully understands that most people view it negatively. You don’t want “higher quality” games associated with the label because it’ll make them look bad. I genuinely think that people need to understand that even if they try to use the word positively it will still always have a negative connotation for the majority of people. This means they actually have to be careful about the use of the word. They have to say something like “this friendslop game is great, and I see you rolling your eyes but trust me this one is great” about a supposed friendslop game.
The best way to not have to deal with this is to just stop. To stop using slop for almost everything that it’s currently used as. To roll your eyes at the use of slop in conjunction with other words and just move on. To remind people that maybe when you use slop for everything it starts to mean absolutely nothing.
Slop has gotten so out of hand. Sure, here I’m ranting about the use of the term friendslop but there’s far more uses of it going around. Things like Qualityslop, Nuanceslop, Marvelslop (typically used in the videogame space to describe writing that players don’t like not because it isn’t good necessarily, but because it reminds them of Marvel movies which also happen to have similar writing to other movies that aren’t at all Marvel related and actually came first, but hey, what do I know), Unreal Engine Slop, Animeslop, Bookslop, AAA slop, and Indie Slop. Hell I’ve even seen Slop Slop used in a non-ironic context as a way to describe how dumb/lazy some uses of the word Slop are.
All of these terms are meant to be used in a way as to call the things they are being hurled at as low quality, as trash, as garbage. The problem is that using them completely removes the need from actually critically looking at these things, describing what you find frustrating, or what you dislike, trying to understand if it’s just a you thing or if it is actually a wider problem. I mean you don’t see me, someone who despises slow walk speeds in games, describe some games as Slow Walk Slop. That’d be idiotic.
When it comes to “AI Slop” I at least understand this usage, AI use when it comes to creative industries is 100% trash because it doesn’t have the human touch that makes something into art. It’s a useful term, even if I dislike it. But expanding that, making it into something you can apply to anything you don’t like, I think is ruining the way we critique things as a whole. I write weekly on here, I take my time to consider what I’m writing, to think if what I wrote is actually worthwhile and if not then getting rid of entire sections of an article I wrote or of a game review I penned. Criticism, taking something you’ve experienced and breaking down why you did or didn’t like it, is something only us humans can do. To use the word slop for everything is breaking peoples brains. No longer are they looking at games like Peak as a way to have fun with friends or have experiences with them, they now look at them in a reductive, derogatory lens.
I just desperately want people to regain some media literacy. To experience something and think. I mean one of my favorite games from 2024 was Dragon Age: The Veilguard (review here and In Defense Of article here). It had the trans character Taash in it. Their story wasn’t just about coming out as Non-binary (a word and idea that has existed for multiple decades in our world and also existed in the world of the game outside of Taash since they were taught what it meant by members of the Shadow Dragon Faction, and is also simply showing parity to words like woman and man being used in the world) but also about them learning to accept others. There’s this moment in the game when Taash is judging and disrespectful towards the necromancer of the group, Emmerich. They are calling him a Death mage, a term that he views as insulting. If you spend time with both of them in your party then Taash actually comes to understand Emmerich’s point of view, they become friends and respect each other. This is something that many people missed in the game. Maybe because they didn’t play with Taash and Emmerich in their party much, or that they just glossed over it or that they decided to just not understand that this was the point of Taash as a character, to see someone grow not just into themselves but into someone who respects those around them. Media literacy would have helped here, this story is often called slop, but it’s not, it’s just a story with a purpose behind it, with a character that was growing and becoming someone better than they were at the start.
If we regained media literacy, stopped using the word slop so much as a way to completely disregard the things we don’t like or even just don’t think was executed super well, I think the industry and world as a whole would be a better place. Course, we’d still have to be globally dealing with a far right resurgence but still, some improvements is better than none. The use of the term slop is simply part of this problem.
Okay, so sure some of this is very “old cat yells at cloud“ coded despite me being in my early 30s, but that doesn’t negate my point. Friendslop is a bad term, and I didn’t even touch on the similarity to incel terminology it exhibits. Games like Peak and such need to be viewed as hangout games, while super low effort games should go back to being called shovelware. And we as a society need to improve on our media literacy across the board. I talk about media literacy a lot in my life and I’ve mentioned in many times in the last almost 2 years, I firmly believe that it’s one of the biggest issues facing our industry, and of course any industry that needs media literacy to truly understand.
Maybe one day I’ll go into detail for some basics of media literacy, talk about how we need to critique and break down media in order to understand it. It’s been a hobby of mine for a long while to go into detail to understand things critically so that’s likely in the future, but I’ve got lots of planned articles so no promises it’ll be soon.
At the end of the day, I know the only way the use of the word slop will stop is if more than just one or a handful of people advocate for stopping it. That the only way is if we work together to resist the urge to use it. Resist the urge to feed into our worst impulses. Resist the urge to dismiss actual critical thought. We have to push the incredibly heavy boulder up the hill together, otherwise nothing will get done.
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