THE JANK IS THE POINT - A Critical Distance Friendslop Jam Essay
More than any other art form, video games tend to be obsessed with perfection.
I think to some extent most artists are – though perfection is an aspiration rather than a reality in all but the rarest cases. Most artists tend to work singularly, or in small groups that share some ethos beyond profit maximalization. Mainstream game development, on the other hand, tends to neurotically fixate on making a game palatable to the largest audience possible.
This has lead, over the past decade, into a visible sort of homogenization from the “Triple-A” games industry: individual art styles are neglected in favor of a sycophantic obsession with realism, strange and unorthodox mechanics are shelved in favor of over-the-shoulder shooters or hack-and-slash games with cinematic climbing sections. Games are bloated into open-world experiences even when this compromises the player’s flow state and leads to a feedback loop akin to compulsively wolfing down junk food for the neural reward chemicals – the taste ain’t good but it’s something to do.
Every “Triple-A” game is intended to be polished, pristine, and a perfect ten. Otherwise, it’s a failure.
These obsessions have been imparted into a lot of consumers as well, to the point that the word “jank” – meaning mechanics or circumstances that feel slightly off, crookedly-implemented, or comic in their non-intuitiveness – is used as an insult to insinuate a game is flawed and unfun. I’ve seen it used interchangeablely to describe both mechanics that were not fully tested or that feel wonky and intentionally obtuse mechanics that intend to create friction for the player.
Sometimes, “jank” can refer to both of these things simultaneously, and suggest emergent game design.
This essay is being written for Critical Distance’s Friendslop Essay Jam, and I must confess that I am not an ardent player of games in the genre; I tend to lean towards single-player games. The main games in the genre I’ve played are Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. However, I have watched friends and streamers alike play a lot of them – and almost universally, the moments most filled with whimsy and laughter are the moments where the gameplay goes a bit crooked. Not enough to impair the game’s flow, but enough to seem a bit cartoonish, a bit silly.
Game-breaking bugs are still miserable, but the limited scope of most games in the genre isn’t conducive to systems being tangled and collapsing via their own weight. The common update schedules and developer involvement with the community means that jankiness that impairs play is reported, acknowledged, and corrected quickly, while jank that players find amusing is left as is. I’ve seen gamers have more trust in these smaller developers than those in the mainstream, and as a result, there tends to be more warmth and authenticity from both consumers and creators.
Games in the “Friendslop” genre tend to have a few integral traits I should lay out: they are intended as multiplayer experiences, rely on gear and items for differention of play rather than experience and levelling systems, almost always focus on a collective goal split between players, and allow for players to both help and hinder their shared progress. There are exceptions to these rules: Meccha Chameleon splits the players into two teams, for instance, and pits them against one another.
Moreover, these games tend to come from either singular developers or small teams, using engines and systems more simple than those passed around by “Triple-A” studios. They do not emphasize realism – you cannot expect to find realistic rolling pebbles when you shoot the floor, you cannot expect realistic water physics that show a reflection in them. What matters is that which is integral to the experience.
Because of this, “Friendslop” games have more directed art-styles, on average, alongside the jankiness – and this, to me, provides an aura of authenticity that I am hungry for in the games I play. Imperfection suggests a game made by people rather than algorithms and committee-approved decisions. When things go a bit sideways – both for players and systems – gamers are incentivized to laugh and jest at the jank rather than complain about it. The lower budgets and lower costs permit players to be kinder towards little glitches and errors.
The “rage” that I’ve seen in games like Lethal Company and PEAK tends to be so much more comic than in games outside of the genre. Flubs, mistakes, glitches, and slip-ups are viewed as an authentic part of the experience, and frustration becomes more tongue-in-cheek and silly. On average players are intended to laugh both with and at one another. Even those games with more of a horror edge like Lethal Company find comedy in the positional audio that cuts off the moment a player is killed, or the ways in which enemies disrupt best-laid plans. Even moments that are legitimately frustrating tend to diffuse themselves because the point of the games isn’t always victory but prolonging play as far as possible. In the same way that roguelikes make failure a mechanic, “Friendslop” games make it a reality that must be faced and accepted.
Your friends are going to bungle things. Sometimes the game will make them bungle it. What matters is the shared experience of play; and the prevalence of jankiness takes some of the onus off of the players. Even when you can trip each other up, you’re united against the game and its fickleness rather than against one another.
On top of this, I think that a lot of gamers – particularly those in their mid-twenties through their thirties – find jank nostalgic. My earliest experiences with games were on the Playstation 2, and as a kid I was driven towards licensed games and budget games that I could find at thrift stores. I played a lot of games that were deeply, deeply imperfect, clunky, and a bit obtuse. An ecosystem existed for mid-budget games made by second-tier developers, who nonetheless gave their games charisma despite their limitations. Graphics were a neat quality with enough limitations to prioritize style rather than a standard, rather than the ultimate sign of modernity, and mechanics were generally directed towards depth rather than breadth. This wasn’t always true, of course, but it was a pattern – one that still has a niche in the ecosystem rather than one doomed to extinction. It’s just evolved into different, slightly more esoteric forms.
While the title of this essay is “The Jank is the Point,” I will acquiesce that perhaps a better title might be “The Jank is a Happy Accident.” That title is less compelling, though, so I will allow myself a bit of wiggle-room.
Does that count as “essay jank?”