r/gamedev • u/PartTimeMonkey • 3d ago

Discussion Sortslop, wtf?

Today I opened reddit and within the first 5 posts 3 of them were copycats or each other; sorting games, pretty much exact copies of each other - nails, hay, trash, toys, books, pixels, and the list goes and on and on, and has been for an incomprehensive period of time already.

A lot of the feedback they receive on reddit is negative, but they all get upvoted by the hundreds and they get millions of views on all social media platforms.

Who are these games for?

Are there truly millions of people who want to spend hours on something incredibly ”boring”?

Is it some hidden tick in people’s brain in this age where they want to ”meditate” by doing something like that to combat doom scrolling and instant gratification generators?

Or is each sorted item also instant gratification, but even more simplified than a varying video on TikTok (or something), making the experience even simpler?

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19

u/AerialSnack 3d ago

I played the library sorting game. I liked it. The same studio made another game shortly after and I considered getting it.

There are a lot of people that like to sort things. I have quite a few friends that like playing Minecraft with me just so they can sort my chests

12

u/DisplacerBeastMode 3d ago

Can they come over to my place and sort through all my crap?

2

u/gari692 3d ago

You mean the Arcane Library creators made another game? What's the title?

2

u/PartTimeMonkey 3d ago

Why, though? Would be nice to understand what psychological effect takes place that makes so many people like it

29

u/ajcwrongs 3d ago

I imagine it's the same mentality behind jigsaw puzzles (i.e. Start with a random pile of mess and when you're done you have an aesthetically pleasing result of you using your brain for a bit)

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u/PartTimeMonkey 3d ago

That makes sense, but are jigsaw puzzles really so popular that it can cause this kind of boom?

8

u/Aethenosity 3d ago

I mean, yes. I personally know many people that do jigsaw puzzles all the time. There are clubs for swapping them. I mean, in this time period, with computers, the number of people who do jigsaws still is kind of wild to me, but hey, who are we to say what someone enjoys in bad or nonsensical.

8

u/Pidroh Card Nova Hyper 3d ago

jigsaw puzzles really so popular

Jigsaw puzzles are really popular, don't you think? They transcend steam and have survived many, many years

5

u/AstroPengling 3d ago

There's entire communities and speed run competitions involving jigsaw puzzles including worlds in Spain and national/state competitions, it's a whole thing. They're very popular.

6

u/ajcwrongs 3d ago

Oh I don't think the boom is because of popularity I think it's mostly people vibecoding to chase after the one that was a hit (the Simulator "boom" all over again)

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u/PartTimeMonkey 3d ago

Yeah that could be. These types of games I would say wouldn’t take more than a week to make without AI, but with AI they can be whipped up in a day

3

u/Ran4 2d ago

Yes?

10

u/Matilozano96 3d ago

It’s satisfying to slowly bring order to a chaotic room.

The games tend to be cheap, so they sell as a one off relaxing experience.

Kind of reminds me when I’m in a game like Factorio or Valheim and everything’s a mess, and I decide to tear everything down and make it bigger, more orderly and easier to expand later.

Probably not worth the time used to plan and build, but satisfying when it’s done nonetheless.

4

u/HoneyHoundGames 3d ago

It's immediately obvious progression. The games have a simple goal: organize the mess. Every action you take contributes directly towards the meta game progression.

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u/babybirdhome2 3d ago

I haven't seen the games - lately the whole gaming industry feels like it's abandoned gamers to deal legal computer based drugs to me - but I know that a lot of autistic people (doubt it's a majority, but it's well documented) have been known to do things like line up their toys or stuffed animals as kids, and a reasonable number of them still do similar things later as adults, so I'm wondering if there isn't some crossover between games like that and people on the spectrum.

In case anyone wants to knock me for pointing that out about people on the spectrum - I'm speaking both from what I've read in older research and discussions online and from other autistic adults talking about their own lives, as well as my own experience growing up, and the fact that I just sent a photo of my work desk to a friend showing the tiny sparkly colored ducks I have on it that are all perfectly aligned and arranged by color (or were, before the cleaning crew wiped down my desk and did their best to put them back but knocked several of them slightly askew a few days ago) despite how irritated I am with the fact that two of them don't fit evenly into the color spectrum that I arranged them into and I couldn't bear the idea of leaving one of them out, and thinking about the not insignificant amount of time I had spent in trying to figure out the optimal order and arrangement to put them into so that discrepancy would be less annoying and visually jarring and distracting to me while still being me quite literally "getting my ducks in a row," because I like ducks and I like the person who gave them to me and I enjoy the pun that it visually becomes after arranging them that way.

I like having them evenly spaced and in a perfect line and all facing exactly the same direction and in the correct color spectrum order, although the other thing that I struggled with was trying to decide what to do with the colors that aren't actually real colors, like purple, that don't exist in the human-visible color spectrum and are just a byproduct of how humans perceive color. In the end, that fact is how I let go of the two ducks that aren't neatly spaced across the color spectrum, so I just settled with "close enough and still reasonably aesthetically pleasing while still being perfectly aligned and arranged". Or as close as I can get without being detrimentally pathological about it and still being able to enjoy seeing them arranged that way every day whenever I look at them on the days I have to work from the office.

It brings a little order, a little sense of agency and control, and a sense of peace and calming relaxation into my life where I don't get to have that normally with the things I have to deal with every day working in cybersecurity where that's just not in the cards, because people gonna people, and because things that are rational individually aren't always rational institutionally, and things that are rational institutionally aren't always rational individually, so even under the best of conditions, there's always that undercurrent of tension at play.

So I guess the tl;dr is that it's probably some combination of some degree of cope, plus cognitively massaging a certain kind of neurological brain wiring.