For this critical play, I chose to play Among Us with several of my friends and random people online. This is a game that I played a lot during my freshman year amid Covid and while I was getting to know the team. The social mechanics of this game grow significantly deeper and more nuanced the more you know and understand the personalities of the players around you. As such, the game feels very replayable from when I first played it with my teammates (who I didn’t know all that well at the time) to now with the same teammates I understand at a much deeper level. Even when you know someone in a normal social context very well, many precedents are thrown out the window in a game like Among Us. Given that this is a lying/bluffing style game, the mechanics of the game (i.e. imposters having to kill all the crewmates to win without being detected) force you and the people you’re playing with to throw out the social norms that we (mostly) abide by in society. As such, you may know someone in a social context well, but in this game, you get to see a different side of them.
Because I didn’t know everyone I was playing against and wasn’t in the same room as everyone to observe physical tells or talk outside of the chat box, communicating effectively was very difficult.Conversely, I had to be very conscientious about not changing my behavior when I was selected as the imposter. I’d consider myself a decent lier, but in the context of this game, since I don’t understand some of the more in-depth mechanics of the game (such as imposters not being able to do tasks or other actions that crewmates can vs. the imposter being able to vent, kill, and sabotage), I relied on ignorance as my reason for not being an imposter in certain cases (when in fact I was lying). I realized that I tend to become more talkative when I’m the imposter, trying to direct the conversation away from me and toward another person (or muddy the waters by claiming it could be anyone). But given communication was limited to the chat box alone (and under a 60 sec timer), there was usually not very productive discourse being had.
Outside of the normal game mechanics in the space ship, once a dead body is found or an emergency meeting is called, the time constraints on the deliberation process incentivizes more chaotic and emotionally charged dialogue. I’m normally a very level-headed, easy-going personality and my friends who I played with aren’t too far off on that spectrum in either direction. That being said, when I was on the hot seat being accused of being the imposter, and knowing a decision had to be made in less than 60 seconds, I found myself getting easily flustered and incapable of making as sound decision-making. Especially because I didn’t have as deep of an understanding of the game as some of my friends, it made pleading my case far more stressful because even if I was wrongly being accused, I didn’t have much proof per se. For example, in the firstThere was a group of 7 of us playing and once 2-3 (around half) agreed to kill someone, the remaining majority would typically fold to whatever the majority decided. As such, there was a higher tendency for groupthink as opposed to direct opposition to what a majority said.
An important distinction I see in the kind of lying that happens outside of a game in daily life is that there’s an asymmetrical deceit occurring (one party doesn’t know and doesn’t agree to being lied to). On the other hand, since lying is a core mechanic of Among Us gameplay, players mutually agree to lie and to be lied to when they play. As such, this form of lying is fundamentally different and less harmful than the kind of lying that we consider unethical in everyday life. I think this in part connects to the MDA principles where at it’s core, a game isn’t its aesthetics but rather a culmination of its mechanics (and dynamics). To a casual player, Among Us is a killing/murder mystery game while from a designer’s point of view, Among Us broken down to its mechanics is all about completing the tasks and objectives for your assigned role in order to “win enough points” for your team to win (imposters vs. crewmates). Out of these mechanics emerges the strategy, deception, and trust building required to accomplish these tasks, i.e. the dynamics. I think what feels viscerally wrong about lying in Among Us is that its mechanics and dynamics are wrapped in the aesthetics of a killing-style game. However, its the mechanics that heavily define a game. Because the aesthetics are secondary (and arguably arbitrary) to the game experience and each player agrees upon the set mechanics of the game (mutual deceit), games permit us to lie to our friends without it constituting a wrong action.
