Every few months and years, I feel language and aesthetics shift. Phrases and terms, even memes and jokes, that I’d parrot fall away to make room for others, while styles go in and out of season. As a teenager and even a young adult, I often felt I could keep up with these changes, but even I have to concede that at 28, some of it is just baffling and beyond my comprehension. This is especially true of the language, aesthetics, and behaviors of the current era of games, where my Roblox-playing nephew will stunlock me with some utterly baffling terminology—something nonsensical like “skibidi—”which emerged from seemingly nowhere, yet has earned such a place in the culture that I’ve seen figures of it for sale at gas stations.
Which is all to say, I’m a little lost at trying to make sense of this moment in games! While I generally feel well-informed about them—at least informed enough to write about them on a weekly basis—I’ve struggled to keep up with the way that the current crop of gamers talk about them and make meaning from what sometimes sounds to me like drivel. The emergence of terms like “slop” and “gooner” as descriptors of games has only made things worse, because though I get their meaning, it is becoming increasingly hard to pin down the through line of it all.
In short, I’d like to find a term or phrase that defines this era of gaming. A shorthand that might help future generations make sense of what was going on in games, or even help someone amidst it, like me, make sense of the noise. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
First, we have to define an era. Although I’m not terribly interested in establishing a window of time, as many of the things that define one bleed over from another, it’s a helpful bit of framing. That, and if I’m being honest, I’m primarily concerned with the kind of games, habits, and language that we’ve collectively picked up since the pandemic, which seemed to radically alter all of the above. Time isn’t the only thing that defines an era, though, and I’ve fortunately stumbled upon some digestible and broad categories that feel like they can fit a lot. Aesthetics, language, and behaviors are all useful ways I’ve found to speak about the kind of generational shifts I’ve observed and am curious about, so for the purposes of this essay, they will be the primary touchstones of gaming culture I touch on.
With that settled, we can move on to the question at the heart of my curiosity: what era of gaming are we in?
I think we are, as a collective, distracted. Distracted or looking for a distraction. We’re noisy. While assessing the swath of video game releases the last several years, and paying particular close attention to the products that have stuck around or even broken through to the mainstream—the kind of fads that keep cropping up time and time again or refuse to ever leave—the through line among it all seems to be the sheer noise of it all, as well as an affinity for experiences that can best be described as escapist.
Video games have a long history of entertaining escapist notions and fantasies. Most fans of them are guilty of at one point or another admitting to using a game as an excuse to distract from the hardships of real life. I’ve often played games expressly to avoid or work through pangs of heartbreak or distress. This is well-charted territory for games, so how are they uniquely escapist now and how are they louder than ever?
Let’s consider the first of my three handy categories. The aesthetics of this current moment are, to be completely honest, all over the place. Games of all shapes, sizes, and textures find varying degrees of success. I can’t point to one make of game that defines the generation, but some of these models give some idea as to how gaming audiences are staying distracted and making more noise than ever.
For example, I’ve noticed an uptick in games that I, from the outside, consider mindless. They’re not quite idle games, but they are ones that require little from their players and whose mechanics and loops promote a kind of mind-numbing zen that simply makes time melt away. It is the kind of game that one plays to ease the stress of a long day before realizing how much of the evening has gotten away from them, and it looks a lot like Balatro or something like Nubby’s Number Factory, which I swear is the real name of a real game.
But these aren’t the only kind of games to which folks are losing time. Look no further than the live-service model that has all but consumed the games apparatus. Whether it’s Fortnite, Destiny, or a bunch of smaller games that show promise but never make the cut, like Knockout City, so many games in this era vie for the attention of the average gamer by selling them a world to get invested in. It invites them to spend their time with daily challenges and steadily unfolding narratives, while selling them everything from cosmetics to new toys and stories. The promise at the end of these treadmills is always more. The further you wade into their waters, the more you’re meant to get out of them. It’s a never-ending distraction, and one that, in the eyes of the player, they can continuously sustain.
In other words, these games are dense, and they aren’t the only mold of game that is. Look at Hollow Knight: Silksong, which continues the first game’s legacy of containing an unsuspecting expanse. Pull on any single thread and you may wind up on an adventure far lengthier than you might expect. Look at 2023’s de facto game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, as another example of a tremendously loud game and distraction. It is full of so many permutations—there are countless endings, but there are even more sequences and stories that can or cannot be seen throughout the campaign based on any given choice the player makes—that it could feasibly be the only game someone plays for years on end and remain novel and/or rewarding.
I often pejoratively refer to games this big as “bloated,” but to another, I could understand the grandness and showmanship of such an experience, and how that might win someone over. Especially one who is bothered by the ugliness and growing instability of the real world. For this reason, games have also been taken over by another descriptor, which often explicitly papers over these hardships, much to my chagrin: cozy games.
As we move into the language of the era, “cozy” is one of the more significant terms to have taken root in the last several years. The games industry has made quite a bit of noise around it, too, dedicating whole showcases to the phrase and the games that embody it. Unlike other genre monikers that gaming audiences have tried to make stick, like “Soulslike,” cozy now feels like a codified aspect of a subculture in gaming; a movement driven by the desire to stamp out the ugly in the world with its own positivity, but without any of the friction or conflict that necessarily entails. It is the genre equivalent of white noise to drown everything else out.
You know what else we’ve been loud about of late? People using terms like “slop” as descriptors. An unabashedly pejorative term, it’s one of the least helpful genre monikers I’ve heard lately–on par with something like “walking sim–” but is also emblematic of the way in which the current crop of gamers talk about the things they play. It’s incredibly lazy and broad. Despite its origin as a catch-all for the products of AI and LLMs, it is now a suffix slapped onto words like “friend” to reduce titles like Peak, which emphasize playfulness and player-driven action and comedy, to something uninspired. This kind of verbiage eschews specificity—“slop” is now hastily and haphazardly appended to a bunch of terms—which increasingly feels like the default attitude of this all-or-nothing generation of gamers that prefer noise to anything else.
And yet despite the condescending nature of the name, the slop is entirely en vogue. Audiences have flocked to “sloppy” titles in droves, especially in the last few years.
Games like Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., and Schedule I come like the seasons now, and when they hit, they always hit big. The looser the game and its structure, the better it is for this audience, who really just want an excuse to hop on a call and play with their friends. And you see this in these games as well as the casualization of even the most competitive multiplayer titles.
What players often seem to be looking for in games these days is quite simple. It’s a third space, one that isn’t as easily encroached upon and threatened by the collapse of civility and previously established norms. They want a place to call their own, where they can be boisterous, loud, and experimental without consequence. And it’s why you see so many of them flocking to experiences like the ones I’ve highlighted here. Ones that invite them to drop their anxieties at the door (or dashboard, in this case) and which care little for stimulating growth or promoting some kind of friction. And more than ever, you’re seeing a class of developers building titles to meet that moment and meet those players that are repeatedly showing up for it. Anything to keep them away from the horrors.
And so we have gaming’s noisiest generation. An era defined by the enormity of its audience and their overwhelming penchant for nonsense. An audience that just wants to drown out the world and be seen and heard. Well, I hear y’all loud and clear.
Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.
