I know this and that they didn’t specifically design for it, but it was the reason for its success, and the community instantly took notice and started designing to replicate that specific phenomenon. The success itself relied on social media, not the devs. I bet if social media in the lockdown didn’t launch it into the stratosphere it would have stayed at its original level of success.
I think among us is a great example of this, to take the first one that got popular. It’s just a form of werewolf, blood on the clock tower, town of Salem, etc. Just distilled and simplified and put onto phones and made accessible. The “gameplay” is that of a board game, just with a few moving pngs. I’d much rather play one of the games I listed above which has more engaging mechanics with the same premise. Among us is hyper simplified, and I believe it relied on social media and the pandemic and an extremely low bar to entry to gain snowballing popularity.
It’s not a “good” game in comparison to most of its competitors at the time. But its competitors weren’t as conducive to social media reactions and didn’t have that spark of luck at just the right time to start snowballing, or lacked the accessibility of simple mechanics.
I typically do not play these games, but I see a new one on a daily basis. The problem with naming and shaming is that someone who sees something they don’t like doesn’t investigate further, but starts to notice trends and patterns over time of the same “type of stuff” on their social media feeds (or suggestions from friends). My friends keep suggesting games like this as well. A couple of them were space themed, a few were horror themed, but most of them (and I investigated every single one at the time since a friend personally suggested them, but promptly forgot about them) were in the same genre of “mediocre but fun game clearly conducive to inciting TikTok reactions”
Edit: just to make a point on the other end, I think lethal company is a pretty great game. It’s immersive, pretty scary sometimes, the “manned ship with a computer” mechanic is unique and impactful, and specific interactions with each monster, item, role, map, and weather make for a bit of emergent gameplay here and there between the normal gameplay. It’s very good, even if I think it has a shorter than average shelf life before it gets old compared to most games I like. It ALSO is conducive to TikTok reactions, but it provides new and interesting mechanics of its own.
I’ve heard it for a while now, and when I first heard it I know precisely what it meant with no explanation. It really is a “good” (linguistically only) word. The definition and usage is asenine and counter productive, however.
I think it comes from a different place, unrelated to graphics. “Old” or “traditional” gamers are more and more getting turned off by games like among us, fall guys, and the like. Those are some early examples which popped off during the pandemic, but the “genre” of similar games is what is referred to by friendslop. Playing games with friends is fine, but many of these games would be entirely unplayable without friends, and rely substantially on interactions with friends to provide entertainment with only a loose framework to support that.
That itself isn’t necessarily bad, but the point where this turns into a problem is when a lot of these games fail or do not try to actually make good gameplay beyond that. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just describing why it exists.
There is a growing rift from the group of people that would be described as “gamers” in the 90’s, 2000’s and 10’s and the group of people that are described as gamers now, which is largely more casual than the first group. The former group is where most of the people who would use the term friendslop come from. They want games with substantial gameplay that doesn’t have to rely on social interaction, regardless if it relies on online multiplayer. The latter group is just having fun doing things with their friends, where 10, 20, or 30 years ago if they were the same age, they might have done in person while “gamers” at the time would still be playing video games.
So the “slop” part of it comes from the idea that game developers are churning out games that don’t provide much entertainment, and you’re supposed to “bring your own” fun in their framework. It also very much seems tied to the rise of youtubers or tick tockers playing these games, hyping up random social interactions and people see those 3 seconds and simply want to experience the (fake) reactions and emotions that are on display. The constant barrage of these games and reaction videos on social media is inescapable.
All of that being said, there’s no reason you can’t make a game that does all of that but does actually have good polished gameplay, but so many games chasing (and catching) this trend do not.
Let me reiterate 2 things: I don’t agree with the phrase. A game is a game and if it’s fun, it’s a good game. But also, it really has nothing to do with graphics. You can make friendslop with AAA graphics and it could fit in perfectly with all the other friendslop games.
KDE on cachyos
back in the day people would download more ram and put it on giant tape-based backup systems. Big companies started downloading massive amounts of high quality ram this way. This created a ram shortage, and companies like corsair are now using their massive reserves of downloaded ram and filling empty ram sticks with them and making lots of money. That’s why ram is so expensive today. Any ram you can download today is low quality ram, and the only high quality ram can be had on physical sticks, which were filled by the companies with ram reserves. 1969 was the peak of the ram harvesting, so you’ll probably get some really great ram if it came from that year.
I’d have to ride several blocks on a 4 lane stroad to go anywhere outside of my neighborhood. It’s so depressing.
Been using it for a couple weeks and love it!
Yes you can.
Yeah I get 4k with Firefox on cachyOS
Good choice with cachy
Yes I’d like to buy 2 please.
Getting annoyed with the attention economy and swapping to this (I love it)
edit: it’s a uniherz jelly star green edition
That was rhetorical. I know the answer and others have already told you.
You can claim it doesn’t make sense all you want, but the fact remains that everyone instantly got the joke.
Then how is everyone else getting the joke?
My favorite was spider-man 2. The story is meh but the combat and swinging physics make exploring the open city SO MUCH FUN. I don’t even think the new spidey games manage to replicate the sense of control and speed this game did. Check it out. If you don’t want to deal with the story and unlocking all of the moves and upgrades, enter the name “HCRAYERT” without quotes as your new game name. It will give you lots of money, put you part way through the story, and give some upgrades. It’s a good way to just jump in and start swinging fast without tutorials or story.
That means they’re removing Denuvo & Symbiote right? Right???
From experience, you walk into the barbie isle in Walmart.
(management whispering amongst themselves) nobody anticipated smooching HR. If they can’t stop chippy’s mittens, who can? What do we even do about an HR smoocher? Call HR HR?