“Slop” is a word we use to contain the experience of meaninglessness.

It’s hard to demarcate exactly what is and isn’t “slop”, but nowadays it feels as if we live inside a world of it. It beams out from our phone screens every time we use the internet. It seeps from the corners of the billboards in our metro stations.

The discourse surrounding “slop”—what it is, why it’s here—seems to hang in the air around us. LLMs are everywhere right now: scratching, crawling, flailing their tendrils in search of things they can resemble. Little by little, and then all at once, our environment has been flooded by a strange proliferation of not-quite-things.

We find books that were not-quite-written and not-quite-edited, yet still place an author’s name on the cover. We encounter music that sounds like a recording of a performance some singer-songwriter once gave inside a studio; except not quite, because there was never actually a studio (nor was there a performance or a singer or a songwriter or even a pressable button labeled ‘record’).

Recently I saw a not-quite-hand-drawn cat poster in the window of a local shop, and I stood there for a second wondering about the 72-year-old shopkeeper’s AI policy.

Underpinning all these experiences is a thrum of frequent, unavoidable encounters with the main attraction/distraction that LLMs offer to the world: volumes upon volumes of not-quite-purpose-made text, barfed indiscriminately into containers that would otherwise play host to actual human people seeking actual human connection (containers such as: social media feeds, fan communities, search engine results).

Pretty much anything an LLM generates could serve nicely as a clear and obvious example of what “slop” is and what sort of problems it poses. Yet it seems to me like this word is both bigger and older than LLMs in particular. “AI slop” gets going in earnest around 2022, but 4channers had already been using “slop” since the mid-2010s to express… well, the usual range of atrocious things that 4channers like to express. And of course these posters were adapting an even older expression they’d found in cultural commentaries of the past (wherein people had been using “slop” for centuries as a way to draw parallels between ‘pigfeed’ and whatever thing they’re critiquing).

It’s easy to find cases where people use “slop” to describe something unrelated to LLMs: Consider, for example, those awkward live-action remakes of beloved past cartoons (Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Lion King, Moana). It’s also easy to find cases where people disagree on whether a particular object is “slop” or not (I have one friend who happens to really like the live-action Avatar remake). Every such case makes the definition of “slop” a little slipperier and harder to articulate.

Recently it’s become trendy to apply the label “friendslop” to games like Phasmophobia, Lethal Company and Flock Around (in a way that seems to iridesce between ‘complimentary’ and ‘insulting’). The use of this genre label is contentious, with some folks leaning into it and others wishing we’d all just choose a different word. It seems like we disagree fundamentally on what we’re trying to communicate when we utter a word like “slop”; and this disagreement has me wondering what the fundamentals of “slop” might actually be.

In this post I’ll develop my own personal definition of “slop” (which you can use if you want to, although it’s probably going to end up being weird). To build this definition I’ll proceed through a sequence of six axioms, each one representing an important choice about what I think this word means. It’s gonna be dense! It’s gonna be philosophical! Some of you are gonna get bored, and a few of you are probably gonna get mad.

I’ll then use that definition to address the “Blogs of the Round Table” essay jam prompt that first inspired this blog post. We’ll try figuring out why people call these games “friendslop”. We’ll talk a bit about its suitability as a genre label. We’ll also comment on some of the emerging aesthetics observable within the friendslop genre.

But before you can get there you must defeat this 4000 word wall of analysis, so… good luck!

A video essay version of this piece is now available over on YouTube!

What can we read into a period of silence?

I mean a period of voluntary non-communication from a person or character: a period during which some speaker declines to speak, or a signer declines to sign, or a text chatter declines to type. What meaning can be found within their conscious act of signalling nothing?

I find that when a signaler is present—a person, let’s say—but the signal itself is absent, it creates a kind of vacuum: an induced need to fill the gap in semantic reality that this person’s silence creates. There’s some part of me that needs to know what their mind is doing. It seeks to glean their thoughts & feelings, even in cases where they’re emitting practically no information. (And if I don’t feel I’m able to glean anything, that makes me kind of worried.)

Psychologists might describe this as an act of ‘mentalisation’, and for better or worse I spend lots and lots of time trying to do it. Everybody does it, to some degree. We do it as part of “sympathy”, as well as “empathy”. We do it as part of “cunning” too, and for that matter as part of “sadism”. All these things require us to imagine another person’s mind even when we can never directly observe it.

As humans we’re very good at this; so good, in fact, that we don’t even need other brains around us in order to imagine the presence of other minds. We can imagine the mind of a statue, or a mountain, or a group of stars in the sky. All we have to do is take bits & pieces from our own experience (memories, feelings, tendencies, qualities) and lend those to some Other as a way of imagining what its point of view could be.

Game enthusiasts like me will even do this with 16×16 arrangements of pixel art:

This essay is about Link, the 10 year old protagonist from Legend of Zelda (1987). He’s one of the first videogame characters I ever saw on a screen; and I met him back when I was the same age as him, so in some sense I guess I’ve always regarded him as a peer.

Link is known for being a ‘silent protagonist’, and I related to that aspect a lot when I was a kid. I related not only to his silence, but also to his suffering in silence: the gravity of his task, the danger of his world, the difficulty of what he undergoes. I related to Link’s battles against Lynels because I guess you could say I lived across the hallway from a Lynel. He’s the person who showed me these Zelda games in the first place.

Recalling our Understanding Comics, we could say that Link’s silence creates a kind of ‘closure’: a gap the writer has created within the world of the story. A narrative ‘closure’ works as follows: The green-clothed kid on the TV screen looks human—or at least like some kind of elf—so it stands to reason that he’s probably thinking & feeling something about all the various ordeals he keeps going through. Yet the game avoids ever specifying what it is he thinks or feels, leaving players free to fill that empty space using whatever is in our heads (and in some sense we’re even required to fill the space, since our perception of the storyworld as a continuous thing depends on our injecting meaning & detail into whatever closures we encounter).

We could further say that in being a closure, Link’s silence comes to function like a mirror: It both invites and depends upon imagination as a primary mode of perception, which means any interpretation I make of his silence will emerge not from Link’s head but from mine (and thus the more I try describing Link to you, the more I’ll be describing myself).

It says a lot about me, I think, that I’ve never actually seen Link as a happy kid embarking on some wholesome adventure to save the world. Instead I see a kid who’s being made to carry a heavy burden alone. He’s left to wander in a place filled with monsters, and populated only by old folks hiding in caves. He’s enduring violence at every turn, and he’s doing it because on some level this is what everyone expects him to do: It’s his duty, apparently, to get killed by monsters over and over again in a quest to save everyone around him from the kind of violence that is currently happening to him.

When I was 10 it felt entirely seemly for a Link killed in battle to lie mangled by the Lynel’s spear; in his death (and subsequent resurrection at 3 hp), all things appeared fair.

Now I’m 36, and I’ve spent two decades struggling with the memories & feelings I have from that time. I’ve tried avoiding & repressing them, which worked until it didn’t. I’ve tried remaining silent about them, but it turns out that makes me really unhappy. I don’t think you can contain these sorts of memories & feelings forever. You’re gonna wind up seeing them every time you look in a mirror—or for that matter, every time you perceive a period of silence—and so eventually I decided it was time to just write the feelings out.

I’ve structured this essay as a multi-part quest. You’ll begin this quest in the Overworld before seeking out three dungeons, each of which will question your courage in a different way. If you’re brave enough to make it through those you’ll emerge at the site of the fabled Temple of Time, whereupon you can discover the mythical Point of This Essay (though if you know anything about my writing style, reader, it’s liable to be well hidden indeed).

Content warning for childhood trauma and scenes of violence. Proceed with care, reader… if you are able.

“Plato’s caving” is the process of gradually dissociating certain knowledge one has about how a show was put together in order to immerse oneself further inside the show itself.

By ‘show’ I mean just about anything: movies, music, videogames, social media feeds. A ‘show’ could be a plate of breakfast sausages, or the people walking past you in the park while you’re seated at a bench. In Plato’s original allegory of the cave he imagines a sort of prehistoric cinema (a procession of different shadow puppets projected onto a cave wall using hidden light sources, such that there are no visible human operators and the figures seem to move on their own).

By ‘dissociating certain knowledge’ I mean reacting to a situation as if certain facts about it were somehow disconnected from it. People do this all the time—especially when they’re taking in a show—because a bit of plato’s caving makes the show a little better. Many fun & interesting experiences involve a certain forgetting of reality, and we have a bunch of different words for it: ‘suspending disbelief’, ‘roleplaying’, ‘getting into the spirit’, ‘losing yourself in the moment’. It’s a fundamental aspect of storytelling, and for there to be a ‘show’ some degree of it must happen.