Don’t call it a comeback. Friendslop was always here.

Note: This piece was written for Critical Distance’s August 2026 Blogs of the Round Table, a community essay jam in which writers respond to a shared prompt. In this case, “friendslop.” This essay references video games published and/or owned by Microsoft. Skybox supports the BDS movement; normally, we wouldn’t mention Xbox games or Microsoft at all, and we strongly encourage you not to support Xbox products while Microsoft remains on the BDS list. This essay is built on stories from my life; I could either write around these games and dilute what I have to say, or I could tell you the truth and acknowledge that they were an important part of my life. I’ve chosen the latter.

I often wish I liked video games less. That I could divorce myself from them, at least for a little while. That my job, career, whatever this is didn’t mean I spent so much time with them. But I do like them and it does require it and here we are. 

It started in arcades. I was not allowed to have video games in the house when we lived in Virginia. My mother and my best friend Rory’s mother would drive us to the mall, buy us pretzels from Auntie Anne’s, and drop us in the arcade with between $10 and $20 before heading off to do whatever women in their late 30s did in malls in the 90s. I’m almost as old now as my mother would have been then. It’s the strangest thing.

That arcade doesn’t exist anymore, but I remember it. It was a rectangle, near one of the entrances with all the doors, side by side like. Real dark. Black carpet you see in corporate stores that would give a bit under your shoes. Soft enough to be comfortable to walk on but hard enough to hurt if you fell.

We had to figure out how to spend the money. Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, my favorite game, was four tokens to start and more when you inevitably had to continue, so we’d play that first. Sometimes we’d switch off on continues. If we had more money, we’d both play our own runs. No matter what, I always took Boba Fett and Rory took Darth Vader. I couldn’t beat Vader. He couldn’t beat Fett. Together, we made it work.

We got good at figuring out how to maximize our money. We had to. There were no cell phones, no ways to call our moms or ask for more money if we ran out. We had no idea where they were, and the mall was huge. Sometimes, if we were going to be there for a long time, one of them would come back to check on us and maybe give us some more money. But there were no guarantees. And if we ran out of money, we had to sit there and wait for them to come back. 

We wanted to play for as long as we could. So we learned the tricks. You could play fighting games on the cheap, and we could play them together. Mortal Kombat. Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Tekken Tag. We got pretty good at them. If other people came up to play, we could usually keep playing, fueled by their tokens until they gave up or the next guy put his token on the machine. There were sacred laws even then.

Sometimes, we would play the machines that gave us tickets. You know the ones: stop the light here, score high there. They never expired. I remember trying to save enough for this cool, giant dinosaur that loomed over the counter from the top shelf like it was waiting for the right kid to make dinner. I saved for several weeks. One day, I went back, maybe one good day shy of the number I needed. The dinosaur was gone. I’d taken too long. I bought a couple of smaller ones. They still sit on my writing desk. I don’t know what happened to the unused tickets.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with friendslop. Stick around; we’ll get there.

We moved when I was seven. My dad was a submariner. “Home is where the Navy sends you,” says the lovely embroidery still framed in my parents’ entryway. I don’t recall if we moved before the arcade closed or it was the other way around. I think I remember coming back one year (we visited friends in Virginia every summer) and finding it gone, replaced by something I don’t even remember. All I know is that it was ugly. That arcade had been a place people gathered. Now it was empty. Something horrific. A mattress store.

In Georgia a year later, my parents finally relented and let me have a Game Boy Pocket after another friend showed me his copy of Pokémon Red. I had no idea what it was. It was 1998. I didn’t have access to gaming magazines. The internet was around, but I wasn’t surfing it for fun. Dial-up was still king, and going on GameFAQs meant my mom couldn’t make long-distance phone calls. Everything was word of mouth.

I did yard work ($10 a week for mowing the lawn) and washed cars ($5 each) for weeks to afford it. I had to prove I wanted it, that it wasn’t some flight of fancy. Eventually, I think my mom felt bad for me because it was taking so long to earn the money I needed. I got halfway to the cost of the Game Boy and a copy of Pokémon Blue (my friend had Red, remember, and we were determined to catch ‘em all) when she agreed to cover the rest. I remember walking out of Wal-Mart with a blue Game Boy Pocket and Pokémon Blue clutched to my chest like I’d stumbled on Spanish dubloons on the beach and had to carry them back to the car. Treasure sealed in shrink wrap. 

I remember learning the Missingno trick, trading our Haunters and Machamps and Kadabras and Gravelers and then trading them back. We didn’t want extra experience. We wanted the ones we caught. Our battles inevitably came down to my Articuno against his Charizard. Nobody cared if you were running a legendary then. Sometimes I won, sometimes he did. They were always close.

We played other games at other houses, N64 kids all. Passed the controller around for Super Mario 64. Multiplayer crawls in WCW vs. NWO World Tour and then Revenge. I remember, strangely, watching someone play Glover. Gex. Super Smash Bros. during the day. Star Fox 64 runs late into the night. 

Eventually, I convinced my parents to get me one, too. It was my mom’s console, not mine. That was the agreement. I was just allowed to use it. My time was tightly controlled. But there it was: an N64 bundled with a copy of Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer, and I could play it. My mom even played with me. I was ride or die for the mighty Dud Bolt. She liked Neva Kee. And wouldn’t you know it, my mom was pretty good.

Two years later, in 1999, we moved again to Nebraska. New friends, same games. We traded Pokémon. Someone used a Game Shark to get a Mew and traded it to me, then went to their parents to say I’d tricked them into it (I hadn’t) who went to my parents who forced me to trade it back. Mew was my favorite. I didn’t have a Game Shark. He did. He could have gotten another one. He just wanted to make me feel bad. After I traded it back, I sat on our back porch and cried. When I went to Japan last year, I stood in line for 30 minutes at the Pokémon store in Tokyo to buy a stuffed Mew. I don’t even remember that kid’s name.

Video games weren’t something you played alone, then. I played Age of Empires II at my buddy Robby’s house after school. He was a nationally ranked chess player, so good he could beat me without his queen. That was how I learned the game. What we did in Age of Empires II wasn’t actual multiplayer, not really. We’d switch, but he was better than I was. I just liked to watch him play. That was how I learned. Sure, you might do a level or two of Super Mario 64 or play Pokémon after school or do a Star Fox run, or race a few tracks in Racer or Cruis’n USA, but that was prep work for the weekends when it would get too dark to stay outside on our bikes and we’d go inside to keep things going as long as we could. Multiplayer was something you did during sleepovers to kill time before Dragon Ball Z Uncut and Trigun and Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim. Huddled around a CRT settled into a wooden media cabinet. Dark rooms, bright lights. Captain Falcon and Link and Pikachu and Kirby battling it out on Hyrule Castle, items cranked all the way up. Or nothing. Or sometimes just Poké Balls, no attacking allowed. Pokémon battles on our N64 before Stadium came along. Star Fox multiplayer until the sun came up.

Yeah, yeah, you’re saying, but where’s the friendslop? Just hang in there.

We moved again, for the final time while I was a kid, in 2001. The same games traveled with us, but new ones came along, too. GoldenEye 007, a game I didn’t finish until I was an adult. We played lots of silly modes: Golden Gun, Slappers Only, occasionally actual GoldenEye. Everybody would rag you for playing Oddjob, but nobody would stop you. You just made yourself the first target.

Games worked their way in and out of the rotation. Conker’s Bad Fur Day, all the cheats on. Walk into the bathroom on one level and your character would toss their guns and unzip their fly, yellow streams replacing bullets. I still can’t think of another game where you could kill your friends by pissing on them. Crude? Sure. But for 12 year old boys, this was the funniest thing in the world. Eventually, someone would get mad and stand right outside the bathroom entrance with the MP5 from The Matrix. Either he died, or we did.

Games were communal things. You brought your controllers and your cartridges to everyone else’s house. Some people wrote their names on their copies in Sharpie. I didn’t; kept mine in a corner so I knew which one was which. I didn’t mind if other people played them. I just didn’t want them getting lost.

New consoles came. Somebody thought the Xbox was the Nintendo system, the GameCube was Microsoft. Nobody had a magazine subscription. Everything was secondhand.

We all wound up with PS2s. The really lucky ones got Dreamcasts. Pass the controller Soul Calibur, winner stays on. 4 player Power Stone 2. Red Faction 2 made us all get multitaps. You could have big matches against bots that would level up and play better the more you played. Tribes: Aerial Assault put the console’s online to work. Only one of us had a PS2 with an online adapter. We’d gather at his house, cords wrapped around our DualShocks, and play all night.

Need for Speed. Then Burnout. Swapping controllers for each mission in Ace Combat 0. Dark Alliance. Huddled together in a room, watching a friend play Final Fantasy X for the first time, eyes wide. I bought a GameCube for Melee. Soon we all had one.

One day, Ryan brought over a burned CD and said “Will, you have to play this.” A copy of StarCraft: Brood War, then several years into its life, and a CD key generator. Battle.net online over dial up, a clan and everything. No Rush 20 on the Fastest Possible Map Ever. Battlecruisers and Carriers colliding in the middle of the map or at someone’s base. Ghosts for nukes and Dark Archons so you could mind control a drone or an SCV and that one poor bastard that actually wanted to play Zerg. Dial-up meant you couldn’t host the room and use the phone, so if you couldn’t connect you had to run across the neighborhood to your friend’s house and figure out what was wrong and then run back.

Middle school. Friendships started with “Do you like StarCraft?” A birthday party for Nick, a dear friend that question brought into my life, where we hooked up a bunch of machines and played StarCraft. Fastest Possible Map Ever. NR20. Like visiting another country, and realizing you already know the language.

Friendslop. I promise we’re getting there.

Then an Xbox, by sheer generosity. A trip to Blockbuster. Finding a game called Halo on the shelves. “Game of the Year. That’s probably good.” Back home. Co-op until 2 AM, then waking up the next day and doing it again. Then into the multiplayer. Custom rules. Running headlong into the Hill on Battle Creek and dying, each grenade on your corpse chaining into the dozens already loading down the bodies on the hill, launching what’s left of you so high you’d swear you could kiss God, the hardware struggling to keep up. Figuring out how to launch the Ghost off a Scorpion in Blood Gulch by racing it up the tank’s body and then off the turret. Loading up Silent Cartographer and trying to recreate the Warthog Jump with one of your best friends on a Saturday afternoon. We did it, even though there’s no record. You’ll just have to believe me.

Halo and StarCraft become constants, all the way through college, because you can do anything with them. A map editor, a couple beers, and a dream and you can make damn near anything. Building, testing, tweaking, playing, building again. Most of my friends go to college in different states, or across Florida. Halo keeps all of us, from every era of my life, together. Now, don’t get it twisted. We were nasty in Slayer. Heartbreakers and lifetakers, killas and thrillas. But the real business was everything else. Make a funny video from that time their Mongoose goes so far under your Warthog on Last Resort that you can see one of their heads clipping through your floorboards and put it on your Fileshare so everybody could see it. Capture that sick stick from halfway across the map and put it everywhere. That game winning Overkill? Record that shit and share it. A funny picture from the campaign? That’s going up there, baby. Memories made and edited and shared all in the same place. Can you imagine? I managed to save all of ours before the servers went down.

But you could do it with maps and modes, too. We made custom racetracks and a zombies mode on Sandbox where the zombies had their health juiced to hell and gone and were Usain Bolt fast. The only way to survive was in a vehicle; the zombies always won, of course. But you could make ‘em work for it, and if you did it right, it was funny as hell to hear “Getbackhereyoulittleshit” coming over the mic. 

Those nights, in an Xbox Live party, brought us (everyone I’ve mentioned here) together, kept us going, made us laugh. One of my roommates kept his headset on while hitting the head (muted, to his credit) between games and one of us (I think me, but who knows) told a joke so funny that he started laughing while he was peeing, couldn’t stop, and lost his balance mid-stream. We had to wash all the towels after that one. 

Or a couple years later, in a new apartment, me and Nick and Brian (the guy who introduced me to Nick in middle school) huddled around our laptops, installing StarCraft II for one last ride. As far as I know, that was the last video game Brian played. He’s a vet now. Beautiful wife, two kids, white picket fence in Connecticut. The American Dream. But for one evening in 2010, we were just a bunch of guys playing StarCraft badly in the same room again.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on friendslop lately. Skybox contributor Ash Schofield wrote about how we lose our grips on one another; Wallace Truesdale II dug into who the term is for; Skybox contributor Bee Wertheimer argued that every co-op game ain’t friendslop; Jay Castello worked through the origins of the term, how we use it, and why it feels good to dunk on; Lotus used it to talk about the differences between Zoomers and millennials and what we want out of games. Jake Steinberg smartly wrote about how the word, and our reaction to it, says more about us than the term itself. Luis Aguasvivas wrote a piece that was so lovely and so sad that I had to pour myself a drink, sit on the couch, and disassociate for a while afterwards.

I agree and disagree with parts of these pieces, but they’re all good. And as I tried to work through what I was going to write for this blog jam, what I wanted to write changed because I’d read them. They’re worth your time.

Some of the discussion around friendslop, though, strikes me as aimed at the wrong targets. I’m sorry to break this to you, but most agreed-upon video game genre names suck out loud and always have. We lost that war a long time ago. If someone who doesn’t know Metroid or Castlevania from a hole in the ground sees you playing Silksong and says “That looks cool, what kind of game is it?” and you say “Oh, it’s a Metroidvania,” they’re going to look at you like you’ve started speaking in tongues. And no, “search-action” is not better. “Action-adventure game” is a classification so broad it’s essentially worthless. Don’t get me started on “character action game.” Some of you will never see heaven.

The truth is we don’t get to decide genre names. Folks can feel however they want about friendslop, but it’s probably here to stay whether we think it’s disrespectful or inaccurate or whatever else. Them’s the breaks. Ultimately, it don’t matter what it’s called; what matters is what it means, and at this point, I feel like you know it when you see it. Better to turn our eyes to other horizons.

I’ve said this before, but I think anyone who is really into games – who reads about them and writes about them and plays them often – as an adult is chasing the way they made us feel when we were young. That’s why I told you those stories at the beginning. Those games are a gateway to memory, to specific times and locations and people. Many of those memories are twenty or thirty years old. But they call to me across time and distance, and bring me back to places long gone. And then they make me unfathomably sad. Not at the passage of time. I never thought I’d live to be this old; every day after 30 is a gift. At the realization of what we’ve lost.

Games used to create third spaces, whether that was at an arcade or at a friend’s house or on a college campus or even a chat room. They gave us a reason to gather and spend time together. In the last few years, that’s gone away. Part of the reason is that there’s no monoculture anymore. You’ll never see a game like Halo 3 (a game everyone I know played) again because we’re more fragmented now. I think it’s part of the reason so many people are so desperate for GTA VI to be The Prince That Was Promised. We just want something like that one more time. 

But it’s impossible. Everyone has slipped into the comfort of their niche. My friend group used to play the same stuff. Now we’re fighting game guys or RPG guys or strategy game guys, and never the twain shall meet. Part of the reason my group got through the pandemic was because we all played Sea of Thieves. Friendslop isn’t new: it’s just the latest evolution of what I like to call “the chat room game.” What that game is matters a lot less than the excuse it gives you to fire it up and play with friends. It’s a shared activity; a reason to spend time together.

But I think we’re chasing something else, too: physical spaces. Folks my age (read: millennials) remember when gaming was something that required you to all be in the same room. Zoomers had some of their formative years (and the best years of their lives) chopped to pieces by a pandemic and an economy that doesn’t want them (or any of us) occupying space unless we’re opening our wallets. Technology has made us more connected than ever. Somehow, we’ve never been more alone.

It used to be you didn’t need games to be friendslop because ponying up quarters at a Guilty Gear machine or passing around a controller in Grand Theft Auto or split-screen multiplayer in GoldenEye or Halo or throwing a LAN party to get your Tribes or StarCraft on all had the same effect: you were in the same place. And if you couldn’t be, at least could play how you wanted in a custom lobby. 

How many games do that now? Will Overwatch or Siege ever give you Forge? Will League of Legends let you make custom campaigns or maps? Will Call of Duty or Battlefield ever see a modding community like Quake’s or Doom’s? Of course not. Because then those studios would lose something to sell you. We don’t even get cheats or costumes for free anymore. You think they’re gonna give you the tools to design maps and modes for your friends? The best way for a publisher to keep you paying is to ensure that you can never get what you need without them. Walled gardens can be beautiful, but the fences are there for a reason.

We didn’t need friendslop twenty years ago because it was everywhere, in everything. When you’re rolling with Slappers Only on Facility or making racetracks on Sandbox or building your own custom campaign in StarCraft’s level editor, you don’t need a game designed to be a goofy, low-key chat room where you can hang out. You’ve already got it, and if you don’t, you can make it yourself. I’m not knocking games like Big Walk. They’re performing a public service; the point is we didn’t used to need to invent a new whole genre for it.

Most multiplayer games (unless they’re fighting games or sports titles or developed by Nintendo) don’t even let you play in custom rooms anymore, much less on the same screen. Is it so surprising that people into the hobby are turning to tabletop games and stuff like Magic when the best way to play a multiplayer game with your friends is for both of you to be in separate rooms and everything is about making “content” and performing for an audience? Is it shocking people have thrown up their hands and walked off the court when the harassment and abuse you might face just for being a woman or a person of color or queer is this bad? Friendslop is the search for a reprieve in a medium that has commodified everything and seems determined to eat itself anyway. No wonder we’re all so damn lonely.

Friendslop isn’t new. We’ve been playing games this way forever. But that freedom we had… it’s gone now, or at least greatly diminished. Friendslop is the search for the stuff we missed, or maybe never knew, but feel the absence of. A need to be together. A physical space. A group of people on a couch, at a LAN party, sharing a moment in time. Maybe those things are lost to history. Maybe we’re doomed to chase them forever. But recognizing something’s absence is the first step to bringing it back.

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