I chose to play Among Us, which was created by InnerSloth and is available on PC, iOS, Android, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. The target audience is people of all ages who like social deduction and party games. I have never played Among Us before this critical play, which made it easier to approach the game with fresh eyes. I played with strangers online using my iPad.
I am generally not a big fan of bluffing and social deduction games, where victory is contingent on the player being able to convince others that they are truthful. During our in-class play sessions with Mafia and Two Rooms and a Boom, I found it uncomfortable to have to defend myself or accuse others of being the imposter when there is limited or unclear evidence, and the face-to-face aspect of having to control your own or read other players’ body language makes it even more uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing for me.
However, this is somewhat mitigated in video games like Town of Salem or Among Us, where the player’s real-life expressions are inaccessible to others and players have to focus more on the objective evidence in front of them. In these types of games, my general strategy is to be quiet and reactionary. As an innocent, I respond only if I see evidence that someone is an imposter, or I want to express a clear victory strategy to my team. I am also quiet as an imposter, only speaking up when someone accuses me of something, or I can clearly frame someone else.
Among Us was no exception to this strategy: when I see an imposter kill someone in front of me, my first instinct is to call a vote and immediately accuse the imposter, telling other crewmates to vote them out—if my teammates want to vote me out, I tell them to vote the other person out once it is established that I am innocent. This strategy is more straightforward when there are less people (the first match I played, I won as a crewmate this way), but I found that it is less effective when the player count is high and there are more imposters (3+). Imposters win more frequently because people cannot come to a consensus in the short time limit allowed for discussion since your messages get lost in the chat spam and there are too many people to keep track of. When I played as the imposter, I framed crewmates if they are in the vicinity of a dead crewmate or use a novel mechanic like venting; otherwise, I stayed quiet and tried to isolate players to kill.
Figure 1: After two rounds, the crewmates only voted out one imposter after six people died.
This brings me to a mechanic that helps differentiate Among Us: forcing crewmates to traverse the map to finish their tasks. The crewmates’ spatial positions are non-static and open up opportunities to achieve more win conditions and strategies: crewmates can finish their tasks to win instead of convincing others who the imposters are, which imposes time pressure on the imposters to isolate and kill crewmates or vote them out. Another interesting dimension that came up in my gameplay was the different roles: being able to vent as a crewmate engineer saved me in one match and I was able to protect another crewmate as a guardian angel, preventing them from dying—though my team still ended up losing. These mechanics help maintain the atmospheric tension of Among Us and add complexity to the core gameplay. Even though Among Us was unable to convert me into an enjoyer of bluffing and deception games, I can understand why other players might enjoy the game’s dynamic.
Figure 2: As a guardian angel, I protected Noblestack from Itzi1431.
Figure 3: The crewmates still ended up losing in the chaos of a 15-player game.
Addressing the ethics question: I believe that lying does not constitute a wrong action when a game incorporates it as a core mechanic and heavily incentivizes a player to lie in order to achieve a victory. Among Us and similar games within the genre are effectively unplayable if the “imposter” always acts truthfully and confesses to their actions, since matches would be extremely short and uninteresting. In general, society seems to view games as providing a layer of abstraction where actions we would deem unacceptable in real life are permitted or encouraged, with the caveat that players should not allow their in-game actions to translate into harm (hate speech, violence, etc.) towards other players and people in real life. In other words, we are able to separate games from reality and accept that they are spaces where we can act out fantasies (within reason) in a healthy way without fear of consequences.
