there’s no clean way to start this discussion, so let us get our hands dirty right out of the gate:
I loathe “friendslop” as a term significantly more than I do the thing that is being gestured at with that term.
“slop” by itself these days is reserved (in my circles, at least) almost exclusively for genAI-tainted projects, a label for material that nobody cared enough to make themselves and someone expects you to care for enough to pay for and stomach the LLM usage for. it’s a derogatory term.
I first saw the term friendslop used by people attempting to demean the concept of being social creatures and playing games with friends, and now it has escalated its meaning to a specific format of game; one that is multiplayer, with enough randomized challenge provided by the game (or incentives to fuck with your friends) to cause havoc and test your communication skills and patience for each other. it is, ultimately, a swath of games that are meant to be ways to spend time with your friends, and to produce stories to tell your other friends about. to create moments, and, to a lesser extent, the fear of missing out on those moments.
cynically, that’s the “successful” business model for these games. you see a clip from a streamer playing with their friends, or you hear about it from a friend of yours, and you go “huh, that sounds fun” and you wonder if you can convince several people to spend the “five bucks” and fight the second greatest recurring villain of our time (scheduling) in order to play it. and then you do, and you manage to get like two or three sessions out of it before the recurring villain comes back and splits up your party, and you go back to other games you’ve been playing, because you justify to yourself that you’ve gotten enough out of your “five bucks”. or maybe, by the time you get to that third session, you see a new clip from a streamer playing a different game with their friends. the devs pocket the profits from waves of interest, they publish new updates to lure the streamers back in; the spiral tightens. the cycle repeats.
that cycle piles up. it gets expensive. it’s exhausting watching a group of friends move from a game you own to a game you can’t afford because it’s new and shiny. and boy howdy, do I get the itch. I love watching variety streamers try a bunch of stuff with friends, even if they only do so once and then never touch it again. but I can’t do that, and I feel bad when people in my life who can afford to treat me to games once in a while do so with a game we end up not playing very much.
ultimately, I think slop is a bad term for it. to me, it’s more… fluff. ephemeral, a good memory, but the only people who can really justify keep buying new fluff are people whose job it is to show the stuff off; even then, a cotton candy specialist can only say so much about the fluff they’re reviewing.
and some games are really good and meaningful to people despite fitting all the qualities one might ascribe to this! big walk has been getting talked up to high heaven and I am interested in that, but it’s a $20 price tag I can’t justify, nor can I really expect to be able to convince a number of people to spend that and whatever time the game would take.
spending time with friends is important, though. we’re all social creatures. I would have gone stir-crazy if I hadn’t forged bonds with people in my life over the years. I really don’t want to give up the idea of playing games together; luckily, even if we don’t have any overlap in more MMO-shaped games (mostly warframe for me these days), there’s always... Archipelago.
playing randomized games has been a hobby of mine for... a while. I was interested in it once the concept was introduced to me via some streamers doing an ocarina of time multiworld in... I want to say late 2018? I could probably wrack my brains and find the specific VODs if I wanted to confirm, but let’s say that’s a reasonable estimate. I know that I roped my fiancee into playing OoT in 2019, as the first anniversary celebration of the end of our podcast, and after that it became a staple hobby of ours.
randomizers themselves occupy a fascinating volume in the mastery space. where casual knowledge of mechanics will get you through a game, more thorough memory might help you with completionist tendencies, and tricks and technical know-how provide speedrunners their methods, randomizers fill in the gap between the three.
knowing roughly how a game progresses is one thing when the game’s narrative walls are still intact, but do you know what story flags you need to set in paper mario: the thousand-year door in order to progress through the excess express when it’s your first area instead of the sixth chapter?
you know that the gravity boots in castlevania: symphony of the night allow you to reach infinite heights in normal progression, but do you know what heights you can reach if you lack the leap stone and can only make one high jump at a time?
do you know how to beat the legend of zelda: wind waker without a sword?
unless you sign up for a competition, you don’t have to answer these questions by yourself. it’s an open book exam. but with time, you learn tricks and little things about these games and how they function that you wouldn’t have thought about beforehand.
in soul blazer, you need to collect the three red hot items to unlock the phoenix magic, the only thing that can beat the final boss. in the randomizer, even if you collect the spell elsewhere, you still need to collect those three items or the final boss won’t spawn.
in the legend of zelda: ocarina of time, despite normal play dictating you only get the light arrows in the temple of time after collecting all six medallions, it only checks the shadow and spirit medallions; in the randomizer, those can be shuffled to other dungeons and may be things you earn very early in the seed, opening up a check much earlier than most players would expect.
in flipwitch: forbidden sex hex, the ghost form can dash through thorny vines, but if you lack the ability to dodge on the ground or dash in the air, it straight up doesn’t function! in the vanilla game, you always have access to a dodge, but you can randomize that away into the general pool of items, and sometimes it’ll end up at the second to last check of a different game, and you get to play your entire game without a dodge button. ask me how I know. go on. ask. thanks for asking. the last archipelago seed my friend group did was a fucking mess.
the answer to “can you beat wind waker swordless” is, by the way, of course you can. my friend eve found that out the hard way after, well,
oh my god i think i pressed the Dont Sword Ever button
why do we have that button
anyway.
there is joy to be found in dismantling the constructions of well-intentioned designers and letting chaos play in the pool of items to build a new progression path. there is logic, which you learn and learn to tweak, and there are new rules to learn, always the hard way. there are moments, there are memories, there are stories to be told, of being ambushed by rawk hawk throwing out 50 damage a turn, of circuitous routes through a graveyard to find the temple of time, of a sea full of a thousand octopi and if you play in an archipelago, you get to share those moments together.
archipelago is the app used to run multiworld multi-game randomizers; multiworlds typically describe multiple instances of the same game with a shared pool. with this, the infrastructure exists to connect completely unrelated games, with a huge selection of games modded to work with the system by, mostly, honest hobbyist devs. the sloppening is happening here, too, unfortunately, and the tolerance for which by the admin is part of why there’s a fork at multiworld.gg with some QoL stuff like setting collecting in the lobby, but, you probably basically knew this. there’s currently very little escape from that slop.
the difference between archipelago and friendfluff, for me, is that archipelago is repurposing something that already exists. something you already have. randomizers take the known and remix it into something different, if not new, per se. instead of burning money on going out to try more cotton candy, archipelago brings you leftovers, shared over a voice call with friends who are also enjoying a meal. it might not all be the same food, and it’s changed since you put it away, but it’s got room to be nourishing, on its own and as a social experience.
were I to use the disagreeable parlance of the day, I would call it aftermarket friendslop. the friends are the most important part, anyway; even if we need a particular thing to do together, why do we need to keep spending on it, when we’ve got perfectly good leftovers? I hate wasting food in both the literal and metaphorical sense.
