akhra

🏴🚩⚧️⚢♾️ΘΔ⚪

  • &🍯she/her 🐲xie/xer 🦡e/em/es

wenchcoat system:
🍯 Akhra (or Melli to disambiguate), ratel.
🐲 Rhiannon, drangolin.
🦡 Lenestre, American badger.

unless tagged or otherwise obvious, assume 🍯🐲🦡 in chorus; even when that's not quite accurate, we will always be in consensus. address collectively as Akhra (she/her), or as wenchcoat (she/her or plural).

💞@atonal440
💕@cattie-grace
❤️‍🔥(not#onhere)
🧇@Reba-Rabbit


Discord (mention cohost, I get spam follows)
@akhra
Discord server ostensibly for the Twitch channel but with Cohost in hospice y'know what let's just link it here
discord.gg/AF57qnub3D

bruno
@bruno

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.


akhra
@akhra

was recently a bit shocked by Will Kunkel (Twitch guy for Extra Credits; industry-savvy, indie-friendly, openly anticapitalist) flat refusing to try Final Profit because "those are default RPG Maker sprites." like, sure probably, but that's not what the game's about? of all the people I'd expect to not have that bias, 🤷‍♀️


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in reply to @bruno's post:

back in the day the term "extruded fantasy product" was used in some circles for the sort of interchangeable elves-and-swords books exemplified by the Shannara novels (and which is now part of the baseline D&D/CRPG genre space). I had hoped that "mechanically separated science fiction" would similarly catch on but it never did

Slop is every major game or anime series getting a tie-in mobile game, it's the ten thousandth I Can't Believe It's Not Dragon Quest fantasy isekai with rpg mechanics, it's the trend-chasing YA novels.

i feel attacked! (not rly)

but it feels like under capitalism, as an office worker with their mainjob eating most of the day, one can only hope to make slop. one wont think of it as slop, but reading the above triggers the realization that this too is slop.
i made it and it means something to me, which disqualifies from being slop for myself, but how would you go about delivering that value? the feeling of "i made this". and what if you enjoy making exactly that sloppy shit? and what if its always subpar? arguably crap?

to some its slop, to others its gilded brass. or whatever.

in reply to @akhra's post:

screenshots also don't show the soundtrack, and like. first launch I just sat on the main menu for half an hour because damn.

edit: oh and actually he subsequently defended the engine when other folks in chat piped up about it. his gripe was specifically with using stock assets, which seems even weirder to me.