Identifying a new genre is a fool’s task, but I’ve never been wise. Sometimes a blossoming genre can be obvious, as when a huge success like Doom or Dark Souls comes along and inspires games for decades to follow. But sometimes a new genre is quiet, low-key, hiding just beneath the surface of a tumultuous industry. Sometimes you have to go fishing for it.
Let’s catch the slippery “hangout game”.
In last year’s Webfishing you are given a fishing rod and some bait. You walk around on an Animal Crossing-style island catching trout and salmon as lo-fi music chimes in the background. Importantly, you do this on a server of 12 people, with a chat window that periodically lights up with idle talk. It is the fishing minigame of any big MMO isolated into its own self-contained pond. There are bigger fish to catch and rods to upgrade and money to earn. But most of your time is spent entirely still, save for the clicking and holding of the mouse when you feel a nibble. You aren’t given quests or jobs to fulfil. You just fish and hang out.
“The core of a hang-out game is a total lack of anything resembling a rush,” wrote Garrett Martin in an article for Paste last year, in which he gave a broad definition of this type of game. “It’s a term I use often to describe any game that’s fun to just exist in, where you don’t always feel pressure to keep moving on to the next goal.”
Plenty of readers will recognise the idea – a game you play with friends to relax. Some might consider Fortnite a hangout game because they play with regular buds and don’t take it seriously. Others might cite nightly jaunts popping skulls in Destiny 2, or a cheeky bank robbery in GTA Online. Martin himself reckons even Elden Ring is a hangout game, once you’re hardened enough to easily survive its lethal environs.
But to me a hangout game is not as simple as any co-op game in which you hang out. It is specifically a type of game in which the goal is to do very little at all alongside other people, in which all adrenal gland tickling excitement is replaced with low-key activities unlikely to spike your heart rate. In other words, hangout games need to be overwhelmingly chill. How can you hang out peaceably when there are so many explosions happening? How can you concentrate on the chat when you have 10 more Cabal heads to shoot, or a final emoter to beat to the chicken dinner in an ever-shrinking arena? The true hangout game, as exemplified by Webfishing, arrives at a time of some dissatisfaction with attention-demanding live service games, many of which lambast the player with goals, currencies, action, and instructions. That stuff is, like, not chill at all.
“People like having a game different from the current ‘meta’ and AAA designs,” says Max, designer of the recently announced Sledding Game. “They go through their gaming life and play all these fancy titles about killing and winning and I think it’s a breath of fresh air to have a game where you can just talk with a friend and not worry about much else. It’s basically like a fancy Discord call.”
Sledding Game is in the early stages of development. You’ll be able to ride sleds downhill for points, buy new cosmetics with those points, and vibe in a cosy chalet at the top of the hill with some hot cocoa. There are a few other features planned, but not many. It takes a lot of inspiration from Webfishing’s lo-fi approach, and is explicitly marketed on Steam as a “cozy, online multiplayer game about sledding, relaxing, and hanging out with your friends”. So what does the designer of a hangout game need to do to make sure it feels sufficiently chill?
“I think you need to focus on the experience being ‘easy’ for literally everyone,” says Max. “If you can play this game without thinking and just chat with some friends, that makes for the best experience. Sprinkle some funny moments in there with a bit of progression and it makes everything much better.”
A bit of progression, though. That’s all. A hangout game is about doing less, not more. When I join a server in Webfishing to ask the players why they like chilling out in this world, as opposed to playing a more hectic shooter like Helldivers 2, they make the distinction clear and even bristle at the idea of comparing this cartoon world with that of Arrowhead’s Managed Democracy.
“Hanging out in other games is different,” says “Ianonator”, who in Webfishing plays as a tuxedo cat with a sardine permanently lodged in its mouth. “This is more personal… In Helldivers you’re not going to talk about how your day was or anything like that.
“I’m just fishing, and I kinda don’t care what I fish. I’m just here listening to music and talking to random people.”
There’s nothing unique about “talking to random people” in terms of multiplayer co-op. But hangout games of this new ilk put the chat front and centre, invoking it as a main selling point. In some ways games like Webfishing and Sledding Game might be better called “chatroom games”. But in requiring that chat function the small-fry indie hangout game has to tackle with the same problems as its much larger netmate – the MMORPG.
“[In] any game where you have text chat or voice chat I think you also need some form of moderation,” says Max of the Sledding Corporation. “Whether it be vote to kick, muting, banning, private lobbies… There needs to be some way to allow people to hang out in the way they want to hang out.”
In Webfishing that means profanity filters and servers you can label as mature, not to mention the developer’s practice of smacking down even the slightest whiff of intolerance. But take enough of a hands-off approach and you might go the opposite direction, ending up with something like Comedy Night, the heinous chat room of big heads and “edgy” (racist) humour. Because, despite its coarse culture, Comedy Night is also a valid example of a hangout game.
And there are more on the horizon (though I’d be fibbing if I said the genre was exploding; it’s more sleepy than that). For example, the developers of Untitled Goose Game are working on a multiplayer hiking sim with silly bird avatars and a similarly straightforward name. It’s called Big Walk. “Hang out and get lost with close friends in a big world,” says the blurb on Steam, which labels it a “cooperative online walker-talker”.
“This is for sure a growing trend,” says Max. “People have been bringing up that [Sledding Game] is like Club Penguin 2, and I think people are missing that in their lives right now.”
It would be easy to view these hangout games as a direct reaction to the endless demands of live service. But there is another possibility. The hangout game might simply be the natural extension of some conglomeration of Steam tags that already exist. There’s no need to invent it. You can hang out with friends with similar nonchalance in co-op farming sims like Stardew Valley. You can shoot the shit in creative survival games like Minecraft. Neither gives you an explicit goal to chase.
The trend of cheap and cheerful hangout games might also be nothing more than a temporary safe haven to those abandoning the crumbling realms of Roblox. Webfishing and Sledding Game as the landing zones for a diaspora of young players who will soon find their kicks in small, standalone games instead of the disgraced virtual sweatshop.
Ultimately, all attempts to corral games into set genres will end in an arbitrary mess of red strings and bloated venn diagrams. Is Golf With Your Friends a hangout game, or is it too competitive? What about VR Chat? Are multiplayer games like Overcooked and Among Us too stressful to count? Where does Sea Of Thieves splashland in all this? All taxonomy is folly. The “hangout game” as a moniker is of limited use. But it can be fun, at least as a watcher of the industry, to identify the quiet trends that burble faintly beneath the surface of the wider gaming culture, like curious carp waiting to bite.