| Hi everyone, it's Cecilia. Today we're diving deep into one of the internet's weirdest content whirlpools. But first… This week's top gaming news: -
EA announced a six-week delay for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, canceled two mobile games and shuttered its Industrial Toys studio. -
The Microsoft studio behind Halo is struggling to find a new direction - Spanish-speaking Twitch streamers are the hottest thing on the platform right now
Lately, on TikTok, the hit 2000s sitcom Family Guy and the popular mobile game Subway Surfers have, somehow, become central to an experiment in attention span that the internet can't stop talking about: sludge content. Two things happen in TikTok's "sludge" videos. One side of the screen is Family Guy's Peter Griffin and his politically-incorrect antics. On the other is the sticky content putty—a video that you can't look away from, no matter how weird or embarrassing it feels to watch. Sometimes, it might be Subway Surfers, a game where a little guy runs atop moving trains collecting gold coins. Other times it's someone stuffing a large metal pipe with carrots. Some people call this the "Family Guy pipeline" — partly because watching one video often means seeing dozens more, and partly because that content might literally include a pipeline. On Jan. 14, videos with #FamilyGuy received 40 million views, according to data compiled by ForUsApps. There's been some hand-wringing that "sludge content" signals the demise of our collective attention span. So why are people making these videos? And are they earning any money? The progenitors of the Family Guy pipeline are elusive. Aside from a couple trolls, no one responded to the dozens of comments I posted under these videos asking for interviews. Just when it was feeling hopeless, I received a Discord friend request from an account called QuagmireDailyLife. The guy behind the account, who declined to share his real name, told me he started posting these videos last year "because I knew that it was a rabbit hole." Second reason, he added, was "money." He has 333,000 TikTok followers on his main account, but has operated as many as five. Every day, he posts between one and eight of these videos, which take just a couple hours a week, per account, to edit together. The videos receive as many as 10 million views. But more importantly, they're watched for 40 seconds on average, eight times longer than the average video on TikTok. Although QuagmireDailyLife declined to share exactly how much money he made, he described it as a "side hustle. Not a living of course." One sludge content account-owner told me he makes $1,000 a month. Another, Bojack Brown, who parodies sludge content, says he makes about $30 for 1.4 million views. For years, TikTok has been criticized for lagging behind competitors like YouTube in helping creators earn money from viral videos. If sludge content was only earning these creators part-time job money, what about the IP holders? A representative for Walt Disney Co. didn't respond to multiple requests for comment about the trend's impact on Family Guy, but I did get in touch with the chief executive officer of Subway Surfers developer SYBO Games. A fan of Family Guy himself, he was tickled by the whole thing. "We love that we can be side-by-side with other great entertainment pieces," CEO Mathias Gredel Norvig said. Norvig was reluctant to tie the virility of the game on TikTok to the company's financial prospects. But, he did concede that when Subway Surfers goes viral on TikTok, "we get a lot of new subscribers." Subway Surfers doesn't need help getting the word out about the game; it's 10 years old with 3.7 billion downloads. But on TikTok, the main currency being exchanged is attention. The editor for popular politics Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who goes by the single name Ostonox, posted videos of Subway Surfers and someone cutting kinetic sand under a clip from Piker's livestream discussing the Black Lives Matter movement in January. It was in part a joke and in part, he says, "because it actually did lead people to watch longer and listen to the video's message." I've been playing a lot of Xbox's surprise January release Hi-Fi RUSH. It's a stylish rhythm game in which a corny rockstar protagonist fights minions from an evil corporation using his guitar. I was surprised at how tight the gameplay feels with such an ambitious concept: hitting enemies with your guitar to the beat of the music. It's easy to pick up, with a great tutorial, and free on Game Pass. | 
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