there's no bite. it goes down easy.

Part of Critical Distance's Blogs of the Roundtable: Friendslop Jam.

Simon leaned the nape of his neck on the head rest of the wooden bench in the empty park behind John's apartment complex. The smoke dipped down his throat then U-turned and erupted out of his nostrils, more chimney than man in the moment. He reached the half-finished spliff to the woman next to him. She sat cross-legged and from the tip of her balanced leg to her outstretched hand was a perfect C. She took the blunt and perfectly balanced it between her index and middle finger. It was a practiced motion, albeit not one born from habit. It was like when you rehearse a conversation in the mirror you will never have. She took a drag but there was no smoke. She tried again, but still nothing. I beckoned for the blunt. We were last in the ring so the paper was soggy and gross from use. Basic science: something doesn't burn if wet so I toasted the paper — I ran my lighter along its shaft. She took another drag and sputtered like an old car revved to life after a long rest.

We have had these get-togethers every couple of months for years at this point. Eight of us (sometimes more, often less) plus friends and friends of friends from university sitting in a drained pool, or in a back yard, or on a beach shore. Each of these gatherings was a miracle of scheduling. Never planned more than a week in advance, a message would be sent out in the group chat: "think we can do a beach one this weekend?" or "gardens free tomorrow :)". Who can make it, makes it with a cameo from a cousin or a new partner or a new old partner. That night there were 22 people. Everyone was laughing a bit louder, dancing a bit longer, and some were smoking for the first time. It was March 2020 and there was a feeling that we might never do this again.

The first weeks of lockdown were a strange mix of estrangement and intimacy. For half of my friends this was the only time I've seen the inside of their homes. That is still true. I remember fogged-up phone camera lenses pointed at afternoon stews, loud family members coming through over hot microphones, an assortment of bonnets and headwraps sheltering 'lockdown hair,' and group calls drifting into silence late into the night only to break into choral laughter upon the first snore.

Two months into lockdown and I received a permit to work and commute as the advertisement industry was somehow deemed essential. For me, that meant a regular battery of COVID tests — one before the shoot, one afterwards, and another during if the shoot went long enough. Film and advertisement production are small industries on this small island but I have never been great with faces. I think faces are like learning a new word. They are Invisible at first but when you really notice one, when you learn it, you realise it was everywhere all along. Sitting in between shots on a commercial for something definitely worth working through an ongoing global health crisis for, was a woman in sunglasses, a broad sun hat, and a black mask. She sat cross-legged and from the tip of her shoe, up her legs, along her spine, then to her fingers formed a perfect C. Apparently it was our third set together.

Four months into lockdown and a month-long job came our way. We decided to shelter together. I moved into her place, the bigger of the two; we were going to the same crew rendezvous on the waterfront each day, we were going to take the same chartered bus to set, we were going to get tested at least once a week, and at this point we were both famished for intimacy. Pertinent to this piece, I packed a big bag including my computer and she had a Nintendo Switch. Gaming was a big part of both of our lives but our histories were different — she grew up on two-dimensional Nintendo games and I played FIFA and Kingdom Hearts growing up. She had little to no experience with any game where the player controlled the camera. In Resident Evil 5 co-op she could not quite nail moving and looking around and instead inched through each level and struggled through each fight. When I took the controller off her she studied my fingers like how you might marvel at a drummer keeping up parallel rhythms in his body. Similarly she had no muscle memory for WASD on a keyboard, her fingers regularly slipping to Q, E, and sometimes even further.

Then there was League of Legends (LoL). After a month of lockdown I had slipped back into the old habit of a couple games of LoL each day and I can make that look enticing. There were no combinations of words I could find to assure her I didn't mind losing. She cared. MOBAs are games of cascading mistakes and snowballing advantages and at their worst, especially if you are new, a bad match can feel like you are the hostage in a bank robbery. Worse for her was feeling like the weakest link in a chain. None of these games framed losing as a learning experience or something natural. It was always “Defeat” in big bold letters, or an exploding nexus, or succinctly "you died!"

Outside of play, tv, and film, Twitch filled many quiet gaps in our day-to-day lives. This had knock on effects. First, isolation and exposure warped our vocabulary and we became a "pog" household. The word wormed its way into our subconscious. Unremarkable in of itself until either of us hopped on a call with any other human being and the word escaped our lips. If we noticed, it was hands to mouth as if to prevent the offending part from committing another betrayal, followed by stifled laughter from whichever of us was the bystander. Worse was when we were checked on it. "What is 'pog'?" How do you even answer that? You stammer, you look around for help, and then you try to will the earth into swallowing you whole.

Second, were "streamer games" or maybe better known today as "friendslop".

"We could play this," she mumbled one lazy Sunday morning. Sundays were our only guaranteed off day; we were laying in bed still groggy from a late shoot the night before and she shoved a video of streamers playing Among Us in my face.

For the uninitiated, Among Us is an online multiplayer social deduction game that can be played crossplay between PCs and phones. Players control cartoon, anthropomorphic blobs from a top down perspective to run around a spaceship and complete personalised task lists. Among that group is a smaller group of imposters who look and behave the same but are tasked with sabotage and murder. At the end of each round a crew member is voted out and removed from the game based on debate, eye-witness reports, and, of course, lies. This goes on until all of either team is removed from the game.

Wrangling a group to play together during quarantine was easy. A lot of that old blunt rotation group was available. Pala and I had our off days. The remote workers needed to fill the empty space where commuting once occupied. Meetings were muted in one window with the game played in the next. We only missed the medical professionals among us, fresh out of university or halfway through their residency and overwhelmed by the patient intake.

Despite being a simple game, the first session of Among Us did not go well. There was a mismatch of expectations. On one side you had people familiar with the game and had seen a stream or two. These players were performers even if the audience was just their fellow players. Often they would opt for choices and tactics that were more interesting than sensible — going for an audacious kill or a barefaced lie. Other players took the game seriously. As imposters they never lied, hoping to dodge eye-witnesses but readily accepting any accusations. These approaches could not mix and came to a head during a decisive round with three survivors. It was me, my quarantine-mate, and a third person. Everyone knew my then-partner was the imposter but what was supposed to be a simple vote was complicated by bargaining — "vote him out and I'll do that thing you like."

We debated ethical play and best practices for Among Us for 50 minutes. Should bribery be allowed? No. One player assured us that if this was the game she was not above, and I'm paraphrasing language I do not want to type out, crossing monogamous lines to have a router plugged out. They could pull it off too. Is lying allowed? Yes. Allowed and encouraged. This was a dealbreaker for a few players. Even agreed upon fibbing in a low-stakes game sat wrong with them. Finally, there was homework: we all watched at least a bit of a VOD of streamers playing, I think Offline TV. This was the most helpful in getting everyone aligned. A streamer's play tends to be heightened but the lessons were real. It was not only okay to lose but it could be fun. Losing provided the opportunity to be a prop in someone else's win. The games were never less competitive but there was a heightened willingness across the board to fuck around. For our Among Us sessions we added a new rule: the ejected was entitled to a monologue, around 10 seconds (albeit no one would dare short a good one) about anything: a promise that we'll regret our decision, singling out a player for revenge, making a final accusation, direct quotes from Shakespeare, Prime Minister Andrew Holness' "rahtid" policies, or just something to get off your chest.

For me, “friendslop” is inextricable from this group of people, quarantine, and streaming. Exiting lockdown (and Pala's apartment), and really entering adulthood, with all the added responsibilities that entailed, shrunk the size of our sessions but did not lessen the frequency. The big get-togethers have gone back to being in person but now most of us are on Steam in some capacity and it's common to check my friends list and see three people in a Phasmaphobia session, or two people scaling mountains in Peak, or a small group doing a Chained Together run and streaming it in a server we're in. A free moment is a couple messages away from becoming an impromptu session of whatever. Whenever a new one of these (the slops?) pings our radar there's a buzz in the group and people volunteer to pick up the game for whoever is curious but short on cash. These games are never expensive, and relative to many other games are seemingly not expensive to develop.

Additionally, very few of these games demand much in the way of system requirements, at least, again, relative to their contemporaries. It's more likely that these games will run on a machine that you own for work versus needing a specialist gaming rig.

They don't demand much of the players either. Compare something like Among Us, Phasmaphobia, Content Warning, etc., with League of Legends, Final Fantasy XIV, or Monster Hunter. Each of those games have not only a skill curve but an explicit level curve. Your character must be this strong or your account needs to hit an arbitrary number achievable only through tens of hours of active play. Deadlock, Valve's in-development MOBA only available to play through invite, recently introduced a ranked queue which demands players have 15 wins on a character in the casual queue to have that character eligible for ranked play. Furthermore ranked play is not available until you have 60 cumulative wins in casual and have a minimum of three eligible characters. While a casual queue and the quicker, chaotic "Street Brawl" modes are available, if the appeal of the game to you was competitive team play, then ranked is what you would want to play as its introduction has, in my opinion, degraded the quality of play and the temperament of players in casual. It is common for players to bail on matches at the first sign of losing, which might be minute one in a MOBA. All of this is without considering the mechanical complexity of these games which make onboarding kin to a weeklong college seminar.

Contrast that with many "friendslop" games where the onboarding is part of the fun. Many of these games are designed for you to poke around their world as much as engage with their 'core-loop.' Veteran players, to the extent that they can exist, eagerly show you around, "look at this bit on the wall," "have a back pack," "have a bugle." For the new player there is no worry about holding back a group because losing is often part of the fun. No one clips their Phasmaphobia wins. Absent the veteran presence, then you have the joy of exploring a game — its world, its mechanics — for the first time together. A group will have its own discoveries and understanding creating their own canon and house rules at least until someone goes onto Reddit. It most reminds me of being a child in those playgrounds in fast food restaurants. There's a focused experience — it's a ladder, some rope, a slide, — with these bits and bobs added — bean bags, dials, etc., — that distract and veer you off course from the goal of tumbling onto your head down the chute.

I came online as server browsers were on their way out as the dominant framework for multiplayer so this spate of games, with their Bring Your Own Friends philosophy, is novel to me and the people I play with who have all grown up on multiplayer matchmaking. It is probably obvious to the people who experienced that server-browser era firsthand but I never realised the passive anxiety I have around "queueing" until I played something where the matchmaking was controlled by me and the people I love. That anxiety was never debilitating but in any game where I'm matching up against or with strangers, I get tense. The athlete before a match who needs to throw up. Removing that edge and the penalty of failure being comedy (more often than not) and not restarts or disappointing your teammates have opened up multiplayer games as something that not only I can unwind to but invite people to play. On the invitation front, I've had three friends get really into Among Us, go off and play Phasmaphobia on their own, and now they've all bought or built better PCs to better play Phasmaphobia or at least to have it look better. Stuck with powerful machines, all three of them have branched out on their own to games albeit sticking to Metacritic lists and the Video Game Awards. I'm working on them. For a few others "friendslop" was them taking the plunge into Steam and Itch and have gone from there to MMOs and cozy games. It is not the revolution that mobile phone gaming was here after smartphones became able to produce console level graphics but similarly it shows a curiosity, if not appetite, for gaming that was stymied by preconceptions and the availability of enthusiast hardware.

There is no substitute for playing a game together on a couch in your friend's basement. Nor is there a replacement for smoking weed with your old classmates in an abandoned buildings. However, the stopgaps and improvisations we have designed, implemented, and then play are important as geography, circumstance, and disability keep us apart. To the extent that we can neatly group games under the very loose term of "friendslop," it is inarguable that many of them are derivative and shallow experiences. The most vocal critics will go as far as to lambast the entire notion of "friendslop" as the nadir of the medium; cheap thrills and quick hits. I think these are games that fit the tiny gaps that we have saved for ourselves and our people within the day-to-day toil of living. We should endeavour to have richer experiences, to pry more time away from exploitative obligations, to carve out more space for our in-person communities, and to connect deeper with the people we love who we cannot touch as often as we want to. Until then though, I think there is value in doing something together that has little bite and goes down easy.

A bit on the name: I don't love it but I don't care. The weekly conversations about how bad/unethical/frustrating it is that we are using "friendslop" as a category is much more annoying than the term will ever be for me. I understand, and at times share, the wariness around the term's proximity to "AI slop" or the sometimes present implication of developer laziness. However a lot of the detractors come across as scolds. There is a parental tone to the criticism and an unwillingness to engage with the people who use the term or curiosity to even observe how it is being used. It would not be the first time that a term is used sarcastically, ironically, or hyperbolically. That "friendslop" doesn't stand up to genre interrogation is less an indictment on its roots as a shitpost escaping containment and infecting broader, if still niche, lexicon, but it moving in lockstep with the other nonsense genre terminology fans of this hobby have adopted without a shred of irony. This is already more words than what I wanted to say.