As I watched the Xbox Partner Preview earlier today, one word stuck out to me more than any of the games shown: slop. It was repeated over and over in the stream’s accompanying chat, denigrating every game that was featured in the showcase, regardless of perceived quality.
The horror-tinged farming sim Grave Seasons was deemed “cozyslop.” RGG’s multi-decade street brawler Stranger Than Heaven was “historyslop.” Super Meat Boy 3D was “meatslop.” The goofy co-op puzzle-platformer Frog Sqwad was of course branded “frogslop,” while The Eternal Life of Goldman was either “cupheadslop” after, apparently, the only other 2D platformer that exists, or just “slopslop.” By the end of the stream, the whole showcase was dubbed “Microslop.”
Now, I’m well aware that the live chat during game showcases has never been a particularly positive place. And to be clear, none of the games shown today deserved the “-slop” moniker, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. But the over and misuse of the term highlighted a larger problem: Everything is considered slop now, and that’s not a good thing.
Just What Is Slop Anyway?
In modern parlance, “slop” has come to be an extremely apt term used to describe anything spit out by generative AI. Glossy, uncanny faces, garbled text, masses of extraneous fingers and limbs, memes in the style of Studio Ghibli – anyone who uses the internet or social media with any regularity has had to grow accustomed to a cavalcade of low-quality images and videos churned out for quick engagement or, worse, deliberate misinformation.
Games are not immune to slop either. Last year, my colleague Reb reported on the murky world of Cert, highlighting how some digital game stores – the Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, in particular – were overrun with slop. “I could make ‘Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game’ and maybe it would eventually get taken down,” one developer said in her report, speaking about how poor those platforms are at policing low-quality content. Nintendo has had problems with shovelware clogging up the eShop dating back to the DS days, but the advent of generative AI has made the problem all the more worse, and slop is the perfect successor to the “shovelware” descriptor.
As social media feeds have become increasingly choked by slop, the public sentiment on generative AI has shifted from curiosity and excitement to burnt out and fed up. Nvidia’s recent announcement of DLSS 5 and its “yassified” faces was met with skepticism and outrage, and now even the hint of AI usage in a game sparks backlash, leading to situations like Larian CEO having to do damage control after some pro-AI comments, or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being stripped of two awards after it came out that gen AI was used during development. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claims he doesn’t love AI slop himself, as if we’re not all trying to find the guy who did this.
Slop Has Meaning – Don’t Take That Away
The one place where “slop” isn’t necessarily a bad thing is the term “friendslop,” a somewhat pejorative but also often self-proclaimed term for the kind of trendy “flavor of the month” multiplayer games that will take friend groups and concurrent player charts by storm, only to drop back in popularity as quickly as they came. Among Us is perhaps the godfather of the “genre” (if you even want to call it a genre), but games like Lethal Company, Phasmophobia, Peak, and R.E.P.O fit the bill here. They’re not always low quality, but many are, often launching under the shield of Early Access to account for a lack of content, features, or polish. Importantly, said lack of polish doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad games or not fun – after all, there’s a reason they gain viral popularity in the first place.
This brings us back to the March Xbox Partner Preview. As I saw the “-slop” suffix thrown onto more and more games, I think it’s critical to draw a line in the sand. Not everything is slop, and overusing the term detracts from its power.
For one thing, calling a game “slop” is insulting to the talented game developers who aren’t using AI to develop their games. Admittedly, I haven’t personally verified that every single game shown during the Xbox showcase is 100% free from AI – and if that turns out to not be the case for one game or another, then by all means brand it as slop – but throwing the word around, even as a joke or a meme, normalizes the term and takes away its meaning. If everything is slop, then nothing is slop, and I refuse to let that happen.
Because Slop is the perfect word for AI-generated content, and quite honestly, one of our best weapons against it. As corporations continue to unnecessarily shove AI into our technology and lives, seeking a problem for the solution built on the backs of stolen content, while guzzling electricity and driving up the cost of gaming hardware along the way, it’s important that we have a quick, correct descriptor to yoke upon their garbage. Simply tagging or watermarking content as “AI-generated” isn’t enough. It’s slop, and it should have to bear that badge of shame.
One bright spot in this fight is the announcement earlier this week that OpenAI shut down its video slop generator Sora. Good riddance.
Bo Moore is IGN’s Senior Manager of Tech. You can find him online @usebomswisely.
