“In Gamespace, the very possibility of utopia is foreclosed.”
– McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory
Our world is a gamespace where many of life’s aspects are playable. In this world where labor, learning and even relationships are gamified, video games are no longer as novel a medium as they were a decade ago. Currently modern games toil in a tug of war between the social and the solitaire. This contradiction is on display through the prevalence of so-called friendslop. More isolating than other alternatives, friendslop collapses solitary and social forms of play, into a vibe (it could hardly be called an aesthetic)—a further diluted experience from what came before. It is virtual sociability done in isolation turning us into subjects who play alone even when we play with others. Friendslop augments the contradiction essential to inhabiting the virtual world.
“You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere,” McKenzie Wark tells us in Gamer Theory. Friendslop and its affect, aloneness (not like sabi which denotes the act of being alone as part of self-discovery and potential personal fulfilment), is situated in a particular zone within gamespace (capitalist’s common sense). Where what we feel and what causes feelings is increasingly obscured. Not only are we individualized, we are also socially isolated and alienated.
Friendslop is a new arena where those that play (everyone within gamespace including the non-gamers) wrestle within a facsimile. Whatever one thinks of these games described by such a blasé term—let us not kid ourselves that this is a genre—they reveal our alienation. Ironic and contradictory yet also fitting that friendslop as multiplayer games manage to make a social part of gaming more antisocial. Friendslop denotes the curse. The gamer is doomed to be alone because as consumers they are fixated on play, like a gambler at the slot machines who stole money from his niece to wager at 2 A.M. at the MGM Casino built on what used to be a community park. The dealer (the developer) is obliged to provide a product which is made under our current market conditions.
Is Pokémon friendslop? At the time of its debut in 1996 it was a weird homunculus created by morphing a single-player game customized by what Pokémon one chooses with the utopian potential of telecoms as a bridge to trade, share and battle. This was made possible by connecting two people, two Game Boys, two cartridges, via one link cable, and a week’s pay (for my family at least). Now this is wireless! For ten years Pokémon GO has made people walk, “become physically active and engage socially” by playing a game, has gotten some shot, and a few players even scrolled off cliffs, some together, others alone. Wanting a Mew in the game can get one killed in the real world this is a cruel logic of gamespace.
I remember with sadness the late nights wasted playing into the wee hours of the morning. Inserting and ejecting PlayStation discs as if I was a factory worker in an assembly line. By the very act minutes blended into hours and the night blurred into morning. Time eclipsed like a horizon viewed in time-lapse. Whilst the temporal melted, pixels and polygons scrolled and panned by my inputs. The outputs—when all was done and the screen went dark—the dread of being alone. This was before online games or learning to drive readily opened the possibilities of playing with others. Isolation, for now, a de facto by product of playing video games.
The popularity of live service games and battle royals (Fortnite, etc.) appears to have tugged the rope more towards social multiplayer. This mirage is a haunted oasis within our desert of isolation. Returning to a time when a game like Pong dominated is a delusion. The thirst for collective experience cannot be satiated by playing with others across space and time via the wonders of the world wide web. The headshots, teabaggings, and racist verbal assaults are devoid of real physical proximity. (Maybe this might be a good thing?)
Since friendslop denotes a particularly ill-defined style of multiplayer games, it does no harm to widen the tent’s cover, so to speak. We can do so because the descriptor has already metastasized from ironic derogatory slang to categorizing low-budget (or indie) multiplayer games. This, already too sprawling, is depthless language meant to place friendslop outside of being anything but vibes base. Vibes are now a dominant assumed expectation of consuming media or “art.” So, friendslop unfortunately can be placed inside the ever-expanding quicksand pit of cannibalize cultural consumption. Fostering real connection is not an aim of gamespace or friendslop. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, the act of doing something together is turned simulacrum – into an aesthetic style (a vibe) displacing “‘Real’ history.” We are lucky if we get even a trickle of sociability from cultural products made under current conditions.
That being said, I have played games that lead to real community, real friendships, and real “history” of interactions. But for this to occur requires some effort outside virtual spaces—planted in the screen and flowers yonder. Hard to do within gamespace, where the virtual and the “Real” are blurred. Arcades bridge the gap – walk the rope being tugged. At recess as a kid, I would discuss how to beat Save Yellow (Gunstar Heroes) and listen as others lied about catching Mews. These games traveled and lived different lives outside of the screen. These experiences still happen, yet they are no longer foregrounded. Another example of a less empty social sort of play, and maybe the best (this is saying nothing of sports), is tabletop, where we sit across one another. In the friendly local game store you laugh, catch a mean case of analysis paralysis, and walk out if you cannot handle the body odor. Real social experience. Vibes destroyed by stench reeking from skin gland secretion.
Again Jameson, “If there is any realism left here, it is ‘realism’ that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.” In 1984 this was written. Forty years on we speak in memes, remember more what has occurred on screen than any other place, and play with each other out of reach.
Experiencing friendslop rhymes with the communication functions of our smartphones. We are able to reach more people than ever, yet we turn off all our notifications and make ourselves unreachable precisely because the technology has made it so easy for us to be reached. I have become content with not reaching out because they do not call. I have 37,617 unread emails, dozens of which are from childhood friends. I do not respond. They stopped writing. Instead, we post replies on dead Twitter or the other platform to the latest announcement of a new game. I know they are alive but do not know how they are living in the “Real” world. I do not know the truth. Any future “history” between us foreclosed. Online this is called an alternative to socializing, a community.
Nevertheless, we have the tools to connect. Most of us have the means to socialize outside virtual spaces and for whatever reason we would rather play Lethal Company with those that will forever remain a bit less than strangers. When I am done with my friendslop sessions I soak on my floor (I do not have chairs or other furniture at the moment because I am moving) and let the alienation wash over me. I simply consume because it is my role in a society where the vibes I get from playing are enough and all media including games are idealized as mere content. They are cheap to make and offer frictionless engagement ad infinitum. Dwelling in friendslop is an existence within the virtual, and we are database animals. Alone on my floor I hear Wark’s words bleeding through the walls: “We all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere.”
Friendslop is ideology internalized to the point where the alienation bestowed by our subjectivity is taken for granted. The multiplayer game’s purpose has mutated beyond the social. In this place we play in isolation together.
I remember when the old Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center got the Dance Dance Revolution machine. Crowds of people, the most diverse I had seen in that already diverse place, waiting to play. One versus one. Side by Side. All cheering for each other as awkward rhythms slowly turned into fluid verses. Dozens hollering in astonishment from the moves. The urban heat island sweltering was not a deterrent for our collective joy. Today players are as diverse as that crowd, yet legitimate fear of harassment makes faces, voices and self-identities remain secret. Play online is done clandestine. In gamespace the player is not a person, nor should she think of herself as such. Limited interaction for all. This will do, a simulacrum of a touch across our abyss.
Friendslop is social media fodder. Experiences shared onto the aether of this isolationist space. At best, friendslop, and our culture that creates it, is a steppingstone towards tangential communities. The scraps we are content with in gamespace.
[The coming discourse after these words will be more… friendslop.]
Aguas' Points 