This essay is written as a part of Critical Distance’s Blogs of the Round Table: Friendslop Jam. Several essays from this jam and surrounding works will be referenced and linked in this essay, do consider them further reading.

As long as there have been video games, the intended purpose of playing them with friends has thrived. Games are a great way to provide structure for social interaction, society seems to have known this since the beginning of time. The appeal of spectating a sporting event has kept many a friend group, business, and society afloat. With this in mind we can identify the shared participatory structures and spectatorial spaces of gaming as a tenet of game design. To paraphrase Sandbox Dunes’s contribution to this essay jam, games are a great way to build a good hang. I want to talk about “friendslop” games, what they actually ask of us in their design, and what they offer us in return.

Derision towards the recent spike in the popularity of the term “friendslop” often contains one of two narratives toward the games that fit the label. The first is that “friendslop” is an ugly word that by the inclusion of the suffix “slop” encourages us to think about these games in a negative light: that they are cheap multiplayer games with inferior mechanical complexity built around disposability. The second is that “friendslop” games are deserving of derision for the very reasons I just listed.

I’ve been a habitual gamer for as long as I can remember. I can tell you stories of being on Skype and Steam calls for hours with my best friend in high school. Both of us being on the more introverted side and lacking encouragement or even permission to be out and about as teenage boys are usually want to be, my friend and I structured our quality time around video games. We tried a lot of different genres over the years, but I wouldn’t call anything we frequented “friendslop,” unless MMOs count. We spent more time sitting around and chatting on Trove, Maplestory, and Rift then we did engaging in seriously committing to the intended play. The openness and the structural looseness of those games allowed us just as much to wander as it did to clear objectives, and we were young and filled with wanderlust that no single video game objective could satiate. If only we had true “friendslop” back then.

The true deriders of “friendslop” games reek of elitism that defined the “git gud” era of gaming, where a certain breed of lone wolf regaled blogs and forums with their great feats of completing difficult video games like mountaineers talk about reaching the peak. These types would often collectively workshop an agreed upon “true” way to play games like Dark Souls: you not only must play these games to prove yourself a true hardcore gamer, you must also play them exactly the way that a true hardcore gamer would to prove yourself a member of the in group. Never mind that Souls games are built around versatility and playstyle variety, but I digress. These “real gamers” sit in concert with common trollish fables: the lone wolf who pacified a younger sibling or cousin with an unplugged secondary controller, or the wandering run ruiner in PVP sections of Souls or MMO games. I can see exactly why “friendslop” games spark this kind of derision from the lone wolf: friendslop requires a hang.

I love gaming with my friends, but finding the right game for a group of people can be a difficult process. In a group of people everyone is going to have different levels of experience and comfort with mechanical structures that certain games require: my TTRPG group didn’t fare well with the wargame combat of Dungeons and Dragons, but Monster of the Week and Kids on Bikes were real winners in our group thanks to different kinds of mechanical complexity being able to better suit the range of players. Another complaint often leveled at “friendslop” games is that you only play these games a few times before never touching them again. My defense for this is as follows: you should want to play games with your friends that they actually want to play. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve groaned at the mention of dredging up a multiplayer game I don’t particularly care for just so I can be included in my long-distance friends’ social time.¹ It’s fine to try something, realize it isn’t quite the ideal, then move on.

No game promises to be the perfect one to play with your friends. Plenty of video games have introduced me to and helped me keep valuable connections for a long time, but the game itself is only as good as the social time they provide. The biggest challenge of “friendslop” games is not actually the games themselves, it’s finding one that clicks with everyone that you want to play them with. The work is in identifying what types of mechanical rigor and incentive structures the people you’re playing with can readily engage in while still being able to serve the function of an engaging social interaction. I really enjoy games that simulate co-working experiences², especially the drug dealer simulator Schedule 1. That game isn’t necessarily built around multiplayer, but the inclusion of it allows for a co-work game that brings out hilarious banter and enriching synergy between my wife, our neighbor and friend, my best friend and I. Content Warning is another favorite of mine. It’s an anomaly horror game like Lethal Company, but instead of extracting scrap you’re a group of vloggers looking to shoot funny and scary videos. Content Warning’s structure allows for a lot of banter as you’re looking to line up the shot, then provides opportunities to ham it up for the camera and make each other laugh.³

Due to the need for a machine to engage with games, “friendslop” can be an extremely lonely prospect.⁴ Even when together in a game space there is always the risk of wandering off alone, out of sight and sound from your compatriots. It’s ghostly, especially if you’re not sharing a physical space. The same can be said for matchmaking systems in multiplayer games that allow for spontaneous fleeting connection. How many different individual people have I played Overwatch with through my hundreds of hours in the game over the years that I’ve already forgotten? While reading for this jam I found Luis Aguasvivas’s assessment of the facsimile inherent in shared digital spaces incisive, especially this point:

“I have played games that lead to real community, real friendships, and real “history” of interactions. But for this to occur requires some effort outside virtual spaces—planted in the screen and flowers yonder. Hard to do within gamespace, where the virtual and the “Real” are blurred.”

My phenomenological query into “friendslop” games searches for the platonic ideal of the “friendslop” experience. With this in mind, the best use case (or even the intended play) of “friendslop” games is not to make friends, but to spend time with your friends in them. Putting the friend before the slop, if you will. Many a game has led me to a rare friendship, but strong friendships lead one to many valuable experiences. Here I think it’s important to internalize Aguasvivas’s notion that experience beyond the game is important for realizing the potential of games as tools for fostering real community. All games are tools of social connectivity, but the thing about tools is that to use them properly, you need to know what they do. What kinds of social experiences do the different “friendslop” games permit, and which are we as players drawn to?

The big difference to me in popular multiplayer games and “friendslop” titles is often in their entropy. Swiftly-paced MOBA games like Overwatch have downtime during matches, but often very little. There’s room for quips and jeers and cheers but not much else. This makes efficient communication with pings and voice chat necessary, and the standards of communicating in games such as these are expected to be followed by all players, making collaborating with strangers easy by prescribing a script for players to follow. The slower pace of games like Peak and Lethal Company allow for more chitchat while players are still engaged in performing mechanical functions. The structure of these games are seemingly built with empty space for unstructured play in mind. The lack of inherent urgency allows players time to orient themselves, discuss strategy, or just futz about. This negative structure is what makes these games appealing: these are games where it’s easy to sit and talk without hurting the pace of activity. Negative structure also leaves more space for emergent gameplay and stories to form. What the games ask of us is to have fun filling in the gaps in their structures. Well done mechanics can help contextualize the purpose of negative parts of the structure - in Big Walk, the pitch black nights and limited proximity voice chat range incentivize players to huddle together in the dark and find something to do to pass the time until the sun comes up (or be the person who wanders off and necessitates a search party). The physics engine of Peak encourages players to mess around with the various items and environments, prompting hilarious slapstick moments that can become instantly memorable. These elements of negative structure seem to me the most important qualifier of a “friendslop” game.

But these negative structures are not as friendly to playing with a stranger. If you don’t know the person you’re playing with it’s more difficult to know how to fill the dead air that these games allow room for. Awkward conversations and misplaced jokes is a poor accompaniment to the gameplay. Like being stuck with a bad scene partner at your first improv class, mismatched dynamics are a considerable turn-off from the experience. Thus, “friendslop” games are best played with folks you already have camaraderie with, they’re a great way to meet a friend of a friend while the friend is also there to facilitate the introduction.

The real social purpose of engaging with “friendslop,” then, is a collective search for the ideal social experience informed by structured play. It is the search for the right game for the right friend, the hang that satiates the emotional needs that drive all of us. “Friendslop” is perhaps not as much about gaming as a hobby than it is about finding the game that brings your people together in the most synergistic fashion. This is a worthy pursuit in game development and in the hobby of play. Ideally the continued exploration of how to realize this type of game as experience can foster further artistic refinement of these socially structured games and gameplay experiences.