Embrace Your Friendslop

It’s been both funny and fortunate to have new friendslop discourse emerge while working on this piece.

All of this discourse (which was much wider, varied and deep that what is charictured via the above collage of messages) essentially centered on House House’s long anticipated Big Walk, which came out just a couple weeks ago. While I’ve only played a bit of it, I can confirm what most critics and players are saying: it’s a fun multiplayer puzzle game where you get to hangout with your friends. And yet, its release sparked a very strange side discourse about what friendslop is, and what using the word friendslop as a descriptor even means.

The side of the discourse that has emerged as "anti-friendslop" has been fascinating to me because while I agree that friendslop isn’t a good name for the genre, I really had no notion that it's negative implications inspired such strong and wide-ranging emotions in people, let alone that some deemed it an inherently deragotory, even unecessary term.

As such, part of my reaction to these takes is that of minor frustration - most pertinently that it emerges in defence of Big Walk, a well marketed game from an established studio that, in the grand scheme of things, did not particularly need to be protected from the horrors of a genre label. More importantly though, I don’t know who it serves to imply that Big Walk doesn’t have something in common with games like Flock Around / Sledding Game / Peak / Meccha Chameleon / etc.

I talked about this in relation to Metroidbranias when the discourse over that genre was at its peak (and before Bruno Dias's definitive blog post on the topic). There are shared issues with both genres: Both have terrible, non-descriptive names, both have a set of criteria that is overly broad. But the notion that the best response to these poor genres is to anhilate / assimilate them is one I cannot support, as it is ignorant of the fact that people actually like what is being described by the genres in question, poor name and definition included.

Poor genres like friendslop still constitute an earnest attempt by an audience to identify a thing they enjoy, and we should be curious as to why people want to group these games together, especially if their criteria seem overly broad or otherwise covered by other genres. That friendslop games can play so differently to one another - 2D or 3D, first-person or third-person, co-op or competitive, horror or cozy - yet are united under the friendslop banner, is itself notable and worthy of inspection.

At the very least, if one were truly intent on anihilating the term friendslop (which I do not believe we could or should), one should at least do so while also providing people the words to describe what they enjoy more specifically, and the tools to identify games that fit that niche. What they should not do is dismantle the single word / tool this audience has, tell that audience they were bad for ever using it, and then leave them without any framework on which to re-build a shared understanding of what they enjoyed.

Instead, a good place to start might be to take this audience seriously - why did a substantial consumer-base want to identify and share a sub-genre of multiplayer games, and what was it about that sub-genre that appealed to them? I would argue that it’s impossible to understand that without also understanding the context that drove this audience together in the first place - the halcyon days of 2020.

In Search of a Good Hang

Remember 2020? We were in a global pandemic, lockdowns were in full / partial effect all over the globe, communities of people were physically separated from one another for months, and the best replacement most of us could muster was an over-stuffed zoom call. Our ability to not just see and converse with our friends, but importantly to “hangout” with our friends, was severely compromised. ¹

Now for the sake of this essay, I kinda have to try and define hanging out, which I'm reticent to do - it’s both an incredibly nebulous and yet intrinsic concept - but for our purposes its still worthwhile to define some core elements that apply specifically to in-person hanging out, which we’ll term here Spatiality and Structure.

Spatiality is relatively simple - in a group of people, there will be some people you are closer to and thus can talk to easier, while others are further away which can make talking to them harder. Conversations can thus flow back and forth between smaller groups composed of those who are nearest to you and larger groups that incorporate a wider set of the people at the hangout. If the spatial dynamic is such that the positioning of people is changing over time, even better, as all of these things allow for a variety of distinct conversational dynamics to emerge, keeping things novel and fresh as a hangout goes on.

Structure refers to any given element at a hangout that helps to drive or modulate the social interaction. Classic examples are things like watching a sport, which allows you to talk about that sport; being at a party, which allows you to talk about the party’s theme / host; walking from point A to point B, which allows you to talk about the things you see along the way; even just getting up for drinks, which allows you to talk about what drinks people want. These allow for conversations to have easy conversational topics to return to or be modulated by, and that allows for the conversation to flow easier without placing undue load on the participants to come up with novel topics or segues at all times.

What’s notable about pandemic-era hangouts, in contrast to real-life hangouts, is that they usually lacked both spatiality and structure - a zoom call has no notion of “near” or “far”, nor was it providing internally compelling concepts. While hanging out in this form was still certainly possible and enjoyable, especially amongst previously established friend groups, or if structure was overlaid on top of the call, lacking these aspects certainly made a "successful" hangout (one that includes all people, allows for a variety of conversations, does not feel overly strained or awkward, etc) harder to achieve.

And so people searched for this style of more naturalized, life-like hangout that didn't also neccessitate meeting up in-person, and some people found an answer in games. This makes a lot of sense - games of all sorts functioned as providers of structure and spatiality when hanging out for centuries, and in 2020, game-playing devices and the internet were more prevalent than ever before. But while there were many online multiplayer games that could technically facilitate a hangout, this pandemic-era was unique in that it placed a demand on these games to function as “total” hang-out spaces - these players wanted these games to facilitate hanging-out first, with them operating as traditional gaming experiences being a secondary priority.

Thus existed a group of people that were assembled into a large, identifiable and needy mass, all of whom were looking for similar experiences, driven by similar circumstances. And the games they were looking for - those with a hangout first ethos - were, or rather became, friendslop games. That moniker would only emerge many years after 2020, taken up because enough games came out fitting the ethos that they needed to be mass-identified, but the genre’s DNA was still established by many of those early pandemic-era hits like Among Us and Phasmophobia.

Friendslop may be a poor genre, but what’s important is what it identifies - games designed in such a way that they facilitate a fun hangout with friends. What's also important is that this genre serves a specific audience, one who needed a particular identifier to better find the types of games they wanted to play. That this description is meaningfully unique from concepts like co-op / co-operative / horror / cozy and others is proof that the genre itself needs to exist, and that it's criteria are distinct from any genres established previously.

Anatomy of a Friendslop

But let's get specific - what are the criteria that make-up a friendslop game? How are they designed to facilitate a fun hangout with friends? And are there any genre tropes or trappings that have been established over the course of it's many year run? While the genre is still quite loose (something which we will address shortly), we can still identify a series of elements that games identified as friendslop feature most of:

Multiplayer

I know, I know, this one's obvious - friendslop games are of-course multiplayer, because one cannot hangout with friends unless they have friends to hang out with. Still, it’s worth digging into how exactly that multiplayer functions.

For example, friendslop games are almost always online-only. This makes sense with the pandemic-era origins, where the focus was online play rather than local, though it also points by to the genre's core ethos: Friendslop games facilitate a hangout, they do not augment a pre-existing one. If you are sitting next to a friend in front of a TV you are functionally already hanging out, and anything on that TV is merely providing structure, rather than being a foundational element of the hangout itself. As such, game that are required to be played locally, or function as though they were being played locally, rarely fit the friendslop mould.

It's also notable that friendslop games, despite being online-focused, rarely have a matchmaking function. This again points back to their ethos: they facilitate hangouts between friends. They are not designed to facilitate fun hangouts between strangers - the idea of having to do voice chat improv comedy with digital strangers sounds like a circle of hell - and thus many default to a lobby or invite-base system instead. ²

Friendslop games also generally try to support a variety of player counts - many opt for 2 - 4 players (though modding can often expand this number), while games like Big Walk support up to 12 players and Among Us up to 15. The goal when doing this is not just accomidation of differently-sized friend groups, but also to have a fun and balanced experience regardless of player count (i.e you should not feel like you are “missing out” by only friend-slopping with 2 people, nor should 15 feel “overstuffed”).

Accessibility

Friendslop games are not typically accessible in the ways we traditionally talk about accessibility (i.e alternate control methods, gameplay modifiers, in-depth settings menus, etc), but they do strive to be accessible along a series of other avenues.

Take that friendslop games often slot into traditional game frameworks - often using traditional first / third person controllers or 2D avatars, with a generally limited range of interactions, with goals that are usually simple and obstacles that are at least easy to identify if not directly deal with. Friendslop games rarely require players to learn entirely novel concepts, and should be easily playable for your average gamer. Consider that even something more unique like Meccha Chameleon still pulls directly from the lineage of the Prop Hunt genre, which itself has appeared in multiple games over the last 2 decades.

This is crucial to the specific approach to “Structure” that friendslop games take - enough to keep people engaged with and moving through the game, not so much that players feel overwhelmed by control schemes, objectives or plot. That latter element is also notable throughout the genre: friendslop games rarely have narrative, instead having settings / situations that are quickly explained and then only occasionally referenced This is all so when you and your friends are trying to have a conversation about your day at work, you don't find yourself interuptted by important exposition or character beats.

Friendslop games can also be considered accessible in a drop-in / drop-out sense, in that if I want to play with a friend, usually that’s as simple as sending them an invite - there are rarely length tutorials or progression elements that keep players apart. There can be complications to this: players need to wait for a gap in the action, like a particular match ending or the end of a campaign, but match times are usually relatively low, and the stakes of a given campaign run are generally small enough to make it easy for players to abandon it in favor of getting another friend in. Again, the point of a friendslop game is to hangout with friends, so they often strive to reduce any friction that would prevent two players from hanging out with each other.

Availability

Similar to accessibility but focused more on the exterior experience, friendslop games are, on the whole, relatively cheap to buy. Part of the way this is justified is that many also have relatively little content on launch and that they are also rarely graphically or computationally expensive (if maybe also lacking in optimization or bug-fixes). All of these are good things for the friendslop audience and the viability of a hang out - they are relatively easy to buy and play on a variety of budgets and hardware, and then easily discarded if not all players enjoy it.

However, it is also worth stating that this also points to a certain FOMO element of friendslop. Being called a friendslop title is somewhat “success”-coded, in that something becomes friendslop in part because a bunch of people buy it, play it with their friends, and have a good time - which itself can then spread through the culture, encouraging other players and friend groups to jump in. This is also tracks with simple social dynamics - it's relatively easy to get a friend group together to do something they've all heard of / are excited about, than if only a single person in that group was trying to push it on the others.

As such, the bounds of what friendslop is feel especially amorphous, at times seeming to expand just to fit in new, popular games. Combined with the fact that we can delve backwards in time and reclassify older games as friendslop, the act of defining friendslop can feel especially tricky. And yet, we also have to accept that, given the core ethos and loose requirements of the genre, it does not mean the genre is aberrant or "useless", though ideally as the genre establishes and the overall zeitgeist around it begins to cool, we'll begin to see it take on a slightly more settled form. Which leads us to...

Communication

The friendslop genre's focus on communication might be it's most defining element on a purely mechanical level. Given the genre's focus on friends naturally hanging out and conversing with one another, it's perhaps no surprise that the genre is particularly interested in communication. Many friendslop games encourage players to play utilizing the in-game chat services which then interact with gameplay elements. Sometimes this is simple, such as sending players who die into a separate voice chat channel, where they can talk with other dead players while they all spectate the living - but the most complex communicative mechanic in friendslop is perhaps also it's most viral - proximity-based voice chat, which makes voices sound quieter or even inaudible when far away or behind walls / objects.

These communicative elements often serve the gameplay, but so too do they serve that aspect of spatialization we talked about - players will naturally have more dynamic conversations as they are modulated by their environment and player conditions. This can be seen as a unique simulation of spatialization - helping to emulate real-life hangouts better than almost any other element we've discussed so far.. It’s likely for this social aspect that prox-chat has become such a staple of the genre, even more so than the compelling ludic elements it provides.

That said, you can likely think of some friendslop games that don’t utilize prox-chat, like Among Us or Meccha Chameleon. Yet, I would argue that even simple elements like being represented by an avatar helps to emulate the spatialized hangout experience - passing someone in the hallway in Among Us might still spark a “Hello!” from both players. And consider that if Meccha Chameleon did feature prox-chat, players would have to spend long periods of the game being silent, lest they gave their hiding spots away. There, the lack of prox-chat is actually in support of hanging out - an example of ethos triumphing over tropes.

Sub-Qualities

There are other tropes and traits that appear in across friendslop titles that arn't as catagorizable or common as the ones above:

• They often have a player-oriented comedic bent to them, allowing and encouraging players to perform bits and play pranks on another. This is part of centering and encouraging player interaction, allowing it even to the defecit of the players' goals.

• They also often feature some element of player-controlled pacing, whether it be via hub areas or difficulty selection, which allows players to fine-tune the exact amount of structure they want in their hangout.

• Many friendslop games feature also some elements of procedural generation as a methodology of making technically infinite content out of a much smaller set of base content. This helps with keeping the costs of the games down as well as allowing players to continue to have novel experiences within previously played games.

Ian Boudreau also made a good point during the Big Walk / friendslop discourse, saying that Big Walk “is a much more traditionally designed game experience whereas what's most compelling about friendslop games tends to be emergent”. I do agree that emergent qualities are generally important to friendslop, many of them being highlighted above, though I would also argue that Big Walk still has it's fair share of emergent qualities. ³

Embracing Friendslop

So, enjoyers of friendslop want to hangout with their friends online. As part of this, they enjoy when a game is easy to play and cheap to purchase because it helps them get their friends together, they appreciate communicative elements that help to simulate real-life conversation as well as modulate it, and they appreciate a light and continually novel structure to help the hangout flow nicely while not overwhelming it. These traits compromise the distinct criteria of friendslop, though if you still don't like that name, I'll offer up a more appropriate alternative: “friend-first”.

I’d be pretty happy to call Big Walk a friend-first, first person co-op puzzler, or Meccha Chameleon a friend-first, competitive, paint-based prop-hunt, or Phasmophobia a friend-first, first person ghost hunting sim - because for all of their sub-components, their design prioritizes friends having a good time hanging out together over all else. But, as a quick catch all, I’d be happy to call them friendslop too.

Friendslop's success story may be complicated, but it should not be surprising - while it is influenced by the rising cost of hardware and various cost of living crises, the long-tail effects of COVID and the increasing effects of climate change, and the intangible influence of streamers, algorithms and FOMO, it also invariably down to a much simpler notion - that players simply want to hang out with their friends.

That fundamental truth is really quite sweet, painting a vision of players who seek to spend their time laughing with loved ones, and find ways to engineer those experiences via the games they play. I hope we can keep this new, socially oriented vision of our players in our minds as we move forward - or at the very least, I hope we do not abandon them just because we don't particularly like the genre name they chose.

Thank you so much for reading this piece! It was written for the Critical Distance "Blogs of the Round Table: Friendslop Jam" - I've been working on a few other pieces of writing for a while but have struggled to push them out the door, so I very much appreciate this jam for giving me the push to not just write, but finish something too.

This piece was long and perhaps overly detailed at points, but I hope that various parts of the piece prove useful for you in different ways as you think about friendslop, and that they all cumulatively served the final conclusion. That said, there was a whole other section that got cut, yet I still liked enough to include elsewhere.

Click here for two theories on why so many embraced the friendslop label despite it's seemingly derogatory nature - without meaning to spoil anything, I think gamer insecurity has alot to do with it.

¹ For the purposes of truncation this argument somewhat glosses over the experiences of a variety of people - people who for a variety of reasons (long distance friendships, illnesses, disabilities, neurodivergence and more) were already hanging out online prior to the COVID lockdowns. I want to be clear that I know these people existed, and continue to exist, but that it's still worthwhile to stress the COVID lockdowns as a pressure point that caused a mass influx of people into a similar position, which flooded this audience and congealed it into a more identifiable, and thus more exploitable, mass.

² It’s worth saying this version of multiplayer has benefits for game devs too. For one, devs are simply more likely to sell more copies at a time as previously established friend groups all make the purchase together. More notably though, traditional multiplayer games generally have to try and induce consistently high player engagement to reduce extended matchmaking wait times - low player counts can lead to long wait times which can lead to players to abandon the queue, which can lead to lower player counts can lead to longer wait times which can -, etc etc. Friendslop games generally avoid this entire problem, given that it's entirely on the player group itself to ensure they are all online at the same time.

³ That Big Walk is less interested in emergent behaviour is a somewhat compelling retort against it being friendslop, but for me the most meaningful non-friendslop element of Big Walk is that it's structured as one long-form campaign. Players can drop-in or out at anytime, but they certainly will miss certain pieces of content if not present for the entire playthrough, and starting the campaign over again isn't particularly viable given that all puzzle locations and solutions stay the same. Still, Big Walk shares enough other traits inherent to the genre, along with having the same core ethos, that I think it qualifies as friendslop.