Okay I feel like at this point I need to clarify what I mean by 'slop' in the context of cultural production. God.
When I say 'slop' I don't mean:
- Things made with few resources (including labor, aka 'effort')
- Things that are outwardly low-quality
- Things that are unoriginal
Slop is often one or all of those things, but not necessarily. In particular, some slop (slop premium, if you will) has vast resources pumped into it.
What I mean by 'slop' are things that are very fungible and replaceable. Things that could be other things and that don't seem to have much in the way of distinct vision. Things that are very low-friction, built around familiar and rewarding loops, that are easy to consume. Things that don't have an aesthetic beyond familiarity and dopamine release. That's slop, an undifferentiated mass of cultural products that just seem to come out of a pipe, and which goes down easy and smooth if you want to suck on that pipe.
Over-saturated genres like survival crafting are of course a great source of slop, but so are big publishers. If I say 'Ubisoft slop' I think you know what I'm referring to. Call of Duty is, arguably, slop. So are Marvel movies. Anything that's 'on tap.' Anything where there's a lot of them (from one big producer or many small ones) and there'll be more soon and they're not very different from one another. That's what I mean by slop.
I think there's always been discourse about specific troughs of slop, and there's always been commodity fetishism, in games, about slop. So yeah I don't think there's a far-reaching novel cultural crisis in the mere fact that some people seem to like this month's slop. There has always been slop and people have always liked slop. Hell, I like slop sometimes. I like things that are worse than slop; I've paid real human money for an NBA2K game at one low point in my life, I can't judge anybody.
But I think what's new is a desire from some Gamers to like... argue in favor of slop qua slop? I think that the commodity fetishism is now colliding with the pro-GAN "I'm glad you'll be out of a job soon" stuff and there's kind of a desire from some people to not just consume slop or even be defensive about slop they like but to attack the idea of things that aren't slop. And that understandably has a lot of people who care about creativity or care about art on edge and more reactive to the ongoing and constant popularity of the slop.
Which leads to people wanting to react and make an argument against 'lazy games' or 'shovelware' or 'kusoge' or whatever, and I think that's where you can get some bad splash damage on people who are just minding their own business making games that are bad in an interesting way.
