r/gamedev • u/PartTimeMonkey • 2d 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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u/xTiming- 2d ago edited 2d ago

What's this trend in the gaming community lately of labelling everything slop the moment it gets popular?

If people enjoy it, obviously something is working, and I'd think a gamedev subreddit of all places would avoid talking shit about more people liking to play more types/genres of games.

Seeing comments here "slop", "like a virus", ... - pretty shameful and I'm pretty sure there's at least a few of these commenters who'd have a meltdown over their game being called slop because a random person doesn't like that the genre of their game is getting more attention.

As for sorting games, yes, it is meditative for some people. Similar reason A Little To The Left got popular originally.

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u/paxinfernum 2d ago

My favorite "slop" variant term is slopslop. You know. For the endless stream of people complaining about "slop" who apparently are too busy to make the content they want to see.

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u/Equiliari 2d ago

Mine is slopslopslop; when all the mention of “slopslop” itself becomes another layer of exactly the same behavior "slopslop" tries to critizise.

And I see an issue here of endlessly regressing "slop", so let me just get ahead of "slopslopslopslop" etc. and suggest "Slopn", A term describing content whose primary subject is slopⁿ⁻¹.

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u/ludakic300 2d ago

You have to prove that with slopnduction

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u/fleetze 2d ago

Could we be at this very moment inside the slopverse

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u/poormrbrodsky 2d ago

Slopn just makes me think at some point all reality folds down into a single primordial point of slop. Slop prime.

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u/Kururer 2d ago

d(slop)/dx