It is the era of “slop” on the internet, it seems. The term popped up a few months ago and everyone and their mom is using it to describe anything that they find a problem with. The word calls to mind a disgusting, gooey blob of unappetizing food - the slop - and has been used in the common vernacular to ostensibely describe low-quality products which are made en-masse. Much like the gross food slop outputted by a machine, the “slop” derogative is something made with very little thought and care for consumer enjoyment. “Eat your slop and stop whining.”

The most popular use is probably the two-term-combo “AI Slop”, referring to AI-generated content made with no human beings in the loop with the primary goal of social media virality. However, the most common use of this term in the gaming world is the friendslop portmanteau: game-related slop, primarily made to be enjoyed with friends.

Many people have commented that this term doesn’t actually mean anything and just exists to deride the horror of, gasp, wanting to have fun with other people! Gamers are notoriously reclusive and hermit-like, so this is an easy to believe and fun to mock way of dismissing this commentary, but I do think there is something more to the term. Clearly something has resonated with enough people to turn this term into a household name, even if they can’t quite put a finger on it.

So what is it?

I’d argue that friendslop refers to multiplayer digital games, where the optimal gameplay strategy runs in opposition to the most fun gameplay strategy, or an optimal gameplay strategy does not exist whatesoever.

What do I mean by this? Well, games in the modern day are seen primarily as a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (as phrased by Bernard Suits), and so the obstacles and the way to overcome them are seen as central to the design of the game. It influences nearly everything in game design, from the popularity of the concept of “flow” (representing the optimal state between challenge and player skill) to the obsession with the concept of “balance”. Players ostensibely open a game because they want to surmount some difficult task.

However, players really open a game because they want to have fun. They say they want to be challenged, but they wouldn’t boot up Mass Effect Whatever if they didn’t think that they’d have a good time doing so. Even people who play rage games like Jump King or League of Legends percieve themselves to enjoy their gameplay more than they get annoyed by it overall. So the player thinks they want to win, but really they want to have a good time. Brennan Lee Mulligan talks about this disconnect, talking about how TTRPG players want to be immersed in a world while also defeating evil as efficiently as possible, making the role of the DM a rather tricky one.

Mulligan also points out something fairly important - as the DM, it is your goal to ensure the most optimal path is the most fun path. “Railroading” is the perjorative term for it, but you want the players to take the path that’ll make them have the most fun, while they are trying to find the path of least resistance, and so you need to make these two paths align as much as you can. That’s the job of a good game designer - to gently guide players to having fun, and to do so in such a natural way that the players can’t tell you’ve been plotting their every step.

We turn back to friendslop, and see the problem. The game ostensibely wants you to be silly and have fun with friends, but if you want to fully submit to the game’s rules and accept its premise, you turn into a spoilsport who’s ruining people’s fun. You want to play the game as its intended, but the game’s systems discourage this, leading to a construction which is only fun if you don’t actually care about the game itself, and are using it exclusively and uniquely as a vehicle to spend time with your friends.

The game Mage Arena is a good example of this: in the game, you cast spells by speaking them aloud into your microphone. The game also features proximity mic, meaning other players can hear you speaking as you approach closer and closer. The seemingly intended gameplay is one where players taunt eachother from afar before casting powerful spells at eachother, many of which are comedic in tone. However, the optimal gameplay would be one where you most efficiently take out your opponents by keeping the element of surprise and blasting them to kingdom come before they realize you were even there - aka, keeping your mouth shut. If you play the game optimally, the primary gimmick becomes a hinderance rather than a utility, as you never say anything other than the spells. To have fun, you can’t play the game as the game mechanics suggest to.

Another example is Guilty as Sock, a multiplayer game where you and others simulate a courtroom. There are many roles one can take in the courtroom, including being a reporter, the judge, the accused, the defense lawyer, a baliff, but despite all of these mechanics… you don’t really have a way to win. The winner is chosen arbitrarily by the judge, and the judge may choose to vote in any particular way for any particular reason. Is this necessarily bad? Not really, but it does make it so you have no real way to “try to win” other than getting on all fours and licking the judge player’s feet.

This is not to say that these games are “bad” or that they’re “lesser games”, to be clear. I had a lot of fun with Mage Arena (other than its issues with my accent) and Guilty as Sock seems like a blast. However, both of those games are impossible to both have fun at, and sincerely try at. You do one or the other, and within the meritocratic “having more skill makes you inherently more valuable” world of current gaming culture, this conflict is one that’s hard to reconcile.