I decided to choose a bluffing game for this critical play because I’m incredibly bad at them! Among Us is a social deduction game created by Innersloth in 2018 that experienced an explosion in popularity during the pandemic. The game is suitable for 4-15 players and can be played by strangers or friends on PC, console, and phone/tablet, old and young due to its expansive, inclusive settings.
For me, this experience of playing Among Us was more frustrating than fun because the game failed to encourage meaningful discussion that was conducive to the key objective of the game — social deduction. Because accusations and voting occured in such a short time frame, which was often less than a minute, players scrambled to get their thoughts out and mass voting usually happened immediately after one accusation was made. This set up gave extreme weight/power to anyone who’s bold enough to speak first and people would vote based on social proof rather than deduction. In a round where I discovered a body and reported it, as I was trying to type out my message indicating where I found the body, someone else accused me of self-reporting and people began voting for me. By the time I finished my message, most players had already voted. Mafia, another social deduction game, suffers from a similar issue involving social proof, but it is somewhat addressed by increasing the discussion time to allow multiple accusations and players to defend themselves. I believe if Among Us were to adopt this and implement some cooldown time for players to wait to vote until the accused and accuser have defended their positions, it would feel more of a dialogue rather than throwing something at the wall and hope it sticks.
In addition, I played with the simple chat setting for the majority of the time where you could not type freely and instead must choose from one of the sentence builders. This led to very bland communication where I could not tell others’ tone or desperation. I was just reading canned responses over and over again. Perhaps this setting was created to accomodate players who struggle with typing, but considering the fact that all of the game’s communication is done through the text chat, taking away the ability to show emotion via word choice and punctuation makes it much less expressive and harder to deduce from. For games like this where the accused have to fight to clear their name, I feel that they become essentially powerless with bland canned responses such as ‘I am being framed’ or ‘[Name] is impostor’ (especially since it’s more common to refer to other players by their color!) I played a few rounds with free chat and I actually felt like it facilitated conversation more and made me more inclined to talk.
Among Us successfully creates fantasy and challenge through its extensive maps, cute character designs, roles, and tasks. Its incorporation of various game design principles including combining objectives (outwit, solution, race, alignment (the wiring in electrical), capture (emptying the garbage), exploration) makes it complex playing experience that stimulates different sensations of the brain. But it falls short in creating fellowship specifically for players who don’t know each other. Because there are no consequences, I played a lot of rounds where people would quit midgame, randomly or because they died. It makes it hard to get to know other players and view them as teammates because they’re not super engaged in the game. This is one difficulty that online games could face more than in person games because the social expectation is much weaker and non-binding. I think a lot of the critique I brought up apply less to rounds with friends or rounds played with 3rd party voice chat since you have many more clues (voice, demeanor, existing knowlege of others) to deduce with, and I think Among Us can improve on the gaming experience for strangers by allowing players to make rooms for players of different levels (this is I think a new feature they introduced where with each game you play, you gain exp and can level up). By doing this, players with more similar social expectations for the game (with regard to what to report, when to accuse someone, etc) can be grouped together, therefore streamlining the playing experience.
Assigned ethics question: In general, we tend to view lying as morally wrong, but many games incorporate lying, bluffing, etc. as a core mechanic. Does lying as a part of a game constitute a wrong action? If not, what is so special about games that they permit us to lie to our friends?
I think that morality as a concept becomes much weaker or even nonexistent when we’re playing games. As a result, I don’t think there are many things you can do wrong in a game except for being hateful to other players or cheating. To me, lying in a game is totally okay in social deduction games where you are competing to figure the other party out. But in co-op games it would most certainly feel wrong because the objective is to work together and lying doesn’t make the experience more enjoyable. I think games are special in allowing us to disregard our sense of morality because we know that we are engaging in fictional worlds and stories. For the most part, any harm in a game does not carry over to harm in real life, therefore actions normally viewed has harmful in real life (such as lying) wouldn’t really be all that harmful in a game. At the end of the day, people play games to have fun and escape, and if lying makes the experience more fun, then where’s the harm in doing that?
