Beware Microgenre Names Bearing Gifts

I recently called a book series I was on book 7 of, “bad”. In response, my wife said, “I’ve tried to stop insulting things I enjoy”. She reads romance novels (and writes them! Buy her books!) and is sensitive to the ways her hobby and her profession are taken as a joke. She doesn’t want to contribute to the atmosphere of mistrust that comes with only enjoying something through validation of another’s conception of quality.

I struggle to get through dense, challenging books with the limited time and attention I have. Instead, I head towards easily digestible novels full of familiar tropes and imagery. I read maybe twenty Warhammer 40k novels (thanks to my local library!), full of things like Space Marines and their guns and their mechanized armor. I’ve read lots of books about dragons and magic. It’s not highbrow stuff. You could call it “genreslop”. However: I will not.

Slop is the stuff you feed to livestock. It is commercial, undifferentiated, and unappealing except to the most pressing needs. When generative AI images are used in posters, that’s slop. When LinkedIn posts using corporate buzzwords flood your feed, that’s slop. When you read a Warhammer 40k novel, there is sometimes an afterword from the author talking about how excited they were to participate, and the people they were thrilled to collaborate with. The novels tend to be filled with purple prose and repetitive plot elements, but there are ones that leave a lasting impression even as there are forgettable ones that I have accidentally re-read. If I called the various series I enjoyed “genreslop”, it would be an insult to the authors who wrote the books I read. It would also be an insult to myself. My tastes might not satisfy the most stringent gatekeepers, yet I am still capable of reading and evaluating a text for myself. The Horus Heresy still sits with me as a enjoyable tragedy full of blood and betrayal. It is corporate, but it is differentiated both from other books I have read and other books in the series. The care the authors put into the work comes through, and I enjoyed reading them and sometimes recommend them to others.

“Friendslop” is not supposed to be a derogatory term. It’s used to describe “disposable”, “cheap” multiplayer games that you play through with a friend a few times and then move on from. However, the fact that “slop” is at the end sits heavy with me. When I had time to play multiplayer games with my friends, they were games distributed for free on floppy disks. Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3d. If the world was around back then, would they have been called “friendslop”?

I don’t play multiplayer games anymore. I can’t even get to biweekly repair nights at my local pinball co-op. Trying to coordinate a single game with friends is not something in my wheelhouse right now, let alone a regular session that churns through different games. However, I have seen clips of games in this genre around social media. They seem fun, and the people playing them seem to be having fun. Streamers seem to like them, and people seem to enjoy watching streamers play them. Calling a good time “slop”, even if it’s used affectionately, seems like the unthinking arrogance of the young who think their domain (friends with free time) will last forever. Calling games “slop” because you only play them a few times seems like calling an ice cream cone or a cookie “sweetslop” because they’re gone after you eat them. The derogatory connotation of “slop” hangs over the entire thing.

I am aware of the futility of warring against silly category names. However, I will ask you to think about how the words used for your hobby shape the spaces you create. Is it good to refer to the people making you affordable games, which don’t try to occupy your entire life, purveyors of “slop”? Is it honoring the time they spent making something, and the time you spent consuming it?

Irony is a delicate tool. When used too often, it slowly dissolves into the literal. If you want to call games “slop” because they didn’t soak investors and pull out every trick in the Las Vegas playbook: pumping up your time on device, making you a reliable Monthly Average User, bleeding you dry by microtransactions, all in order to guarantee a return, well. I think you might be pointing your ironic apellation the exact wrong direction.