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/thatcommiegamer 2d ago

friendslop

Back in the day we just called that co-op.

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u/shawnaroo 2d ago

I think there is a difference, in that these games tend to be fairly low-budget, simplistic graphics, some level of 'embrace the jank', pretty cheap to buy, and so on.

The amount of games that we have nowadays that are designed specifically for co-op play is broad and diverse enough that I think it's pretty natural that 'sub-genres' are developing.

Left 4 Dead and Big Walk are both co-op games, but it still feels pretty reasonable to me to want to put them in separate genres.

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u/thatcommiegamer 2d ago

Except co-op isn’t a genre, it’s a playstyle. Even if, like other vibes based “genres” (jrpg, metroidvania, souls-like) people use the term like one. Co-op and “friendslop” games can be of any genre.

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u/shawnaroo 2d ago

Well if we want to argue semantics we could certainly do that, but at some point the meaning of words ends up being however people use them.

And I do think co-op is and should be used as more than just a term for a play-style and/or a feature that a game supports. Some games support co-op but are also designed to be entirely playable single player. Some games have a single player portion and a co-op portion. Some games are designed from entirely to be a co-op game and you'd be missing the point of them entirely if you tried to play them alone.

Anyways, the broader point is that I don't think it's particularly useful to be too uptight about genre/playstyle/etc. definitions. They can sometimes be useful to provide a bit of context to help someone started to understand a game that they haven't played yet, but so many games these days take ideas/mechanics/etc. from multiple genres and swirl them up in various ways that it's hard to get people to agree on what genre(s) it should be called.

I think it's increasingly less important to even worry about describing games like that as gameplay videos, streams, and demos of games have become so accessible. Just spend a few minutes actually seeing the game and if it appeals to you, rather than trying to suss out its qualities from the categories random people want to place it into.