Update: We’re extending the jam to August 31!
Happy Monday, Readers (and Writers)! We’re practicing some necromancy today by bringing back a beloved and long-running feature to Critical Distance: the Blogs of the Round Table! Originally started by storyteller and game designer Corvus Elrod in the 2000s before our founder Ben Abraham ported it over here, Blogs of the Round Table was a monthly community writing event that presented writers of all calibers with a theme to blog about, a broad time limit, and few restrictions on what they could write about. Since our successful Patreon drive earlier this year, Blogs of the Round Table has been one of the features we’ve been kicking around in discussions of what to bring back. All that was missing was a theme.
Late last week, the stars aligned! We happened across Abram Buehner, Lost In Cult‘s Senior Editor, musing aloud on Bluesky that social games like Meccha Chameleon rarely seem to get coverage outside of business reporting. He noted a distinct absence of meaningful criticism on these kinds of games, which simultaneously seemed to dominate culture and get ignored by enthusiasts in media. We figure: why not fill that hole a little bit?
And so, our re-inaugural BoRT prompt for you all is Friendslop:
Coined by a Twitter/X user in 2025, “Friendslop” has quickly become a catch-all term for a kind of casual social videogame phenomenon that includes titles like PEAK, Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and this summer’s most recent hit, Meccha Chameleon. With this term and these games, there’s an opportunity to have a good conversation around everything from the design, aesthetics and mechanical priorities of these games to the fraught etymologies, genre taxonomies and generational divides that inform them. For this special pilot Blogs of the Round Table essay jam, we welcome you, whether you love the term or hate it, to take some time this month and jot some thoughts down about friendslop—and all that entails.
If you’re looking for a sort of introductory text to friendslop to get you started, Lotus’s eponymous essay from 2025 may help get you set up and on the right track. Here are the rules for the jam:
- Because we’re starting on Monday, July 20th, you’ll have 30 days, or until August 19th, to write whatever you want on this subject. You can join our discord and utilize our blog workshop channel to brainstorm with other members of the Critical Distance community, and you can submit your post(s) to one of several places: on Bluesky, with the hashtag #BoRT, via email or through our discord in the Jam Submissions channel.
- Blogs of the Round Table is lightly curated. As long as you submit your post correctly as detailed above, your post will be included in the post-jam roundup. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
- Think of the BoRT topic as a starting point. Connecting your piece to the topic can be as creative as you want. We’re interested in both writing and play, so be playful when you approach the round table!
- Regular reading of other BoRT participants isn’t required, but highly encouraged. Feel free to browse the #BoRT tag on Bluesky to see if there are any words submitted already that you could use as a springboard for your own posts.
- As a knight of the round table we encourage you to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece and give the original writer a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going!
- If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start.
- We reserve the right to reject work that is patently hateful or offensive, that we suspect uses generative AI wholly or in part in its production, or does not engage with the theme at all.
- You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. However, we can’t include paywalled material in the round-up without access to the article text or a transcript, so if your work is paywalled please send us either a gift link or a version of the article we will be able to access.
Good luck and happy blogging everyone! We can’t wait to see what you come up with.