Innersloth’s Among Us is an online social deduction game that rose to immense popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game is available on most major platforms and supports cross-play, making it easy for friends and strangers alike to queue into a lobby and start a game. Despite being a multiplayer game, Among Us is not the place to go for online socializing. In this game, communication is limited, and deceit is encouraged. I played the game on mobile, which meant communication was only possible through text chat (other versions of the game support voice communication). While the game is really for everyone, it’s probably a little out of reach for some young children due to the cartoon violence.
The standard configuration of the game places players on a broken spaceship needing repair. Players are assigned one of two roles: “Crewmate” or “Imposter.” Crewmates must repair the ship and avoid getting killed by the Imposters, who simultaneously try to sabotage the repairs and kill Crewmates without the crew discovering their true identity. During meetings, players can discuss anything suspicious they’ve seen, accuse players of being Imposters, and vote to throw someone out of the airlock. The game can end in several ways, the most common method being killing or ejecting everyone on the other team.
In collaborative and social groups where I don’t have a lot of information, I tend to let others speak and strive not to cause trouble. I’m also a lousy liar. In Among Us, the game’s chat mechanics and diametrically opposed roles asymmetrically reward my social behavior depending on which role I am assigned. I survive much more often as an honest Crewmate because that role is more suited to a less assertive or cunning playstyle.
Let’s talk about the roles first. A big difference between Crewmates and Imposters is that winning as an Imposter requires cunning and mental effort, while a Crewmate can succeed simply by minding their own business. When I’m assigned a Crewmate role, I can choose to ignore everything else happening in the game and focus on completing my tasks and stopping sabotage attempts, which is exactly what the crew wants me to do. When someone asks what I was doing before a meeting is called, I just tell them the truth. As an Imposter, if I’m not keeping track of the whole game (where players are, which tasks I’m going to fake, who is watching me, etc.) and lying about my true intentions, I will get found out pretty quickly. Because keeping up with the lies and the game state is quite difficult for me, I am not very skilled at fooling the crew when I’m the Imposter. One time, I did an experiment as a Crewmate where I just wandered around the ship instead of doing my job. When the first body was found, I was already a suspect, even though I wasn’t near the body. They ended up voting me out.
Tracking information and deceiving the group is not unique to Among Us. As we’ve learned, games are abstractions (patterns) dressed up in a narrative. The same sort of pattern can be found in other games like Werewolf, which we played in class. What separates these games is how they are skinned and the additional components in Among Us, like tasks. The shared pattern between these two games works in both cases because it is fun. We learned in the reading from What Games Are and Aren’t that “fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally” (pg. 24). As players get better at Among Us, they start to understand how to spot suspicious behavior, argue their way out of being ejected, and convince the group who to vote for. Experiencing these moments is the fun part of the game.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t experience that much fun when playing as the Imposter, probably because I have still yet to master the mental problem of deception and winning the favor of the group. As a designer, I would try to think about balancing the difficulty of the two roles for different types of players. One way to do this would be to let Imposters do tasks too. If an Imposter is worried they might soon get found out, they can start acting exactly like a Crewmate to lay low. This is mentally easier than trying to fake tasks and gives Imposters like me another way to argue their innocence besides lying.
Next, I want to talk about the mechanics of communication. The only way to communicate in the mobile version of Among Us is to use text chat during meetings; players cannot chat outside of meetings. Meetings create a dynamic where loud, assertive voices are influential while quieter players sink into the background. When I’m in a meeting, I almost always keep quiet and let the other players make their claims. Voters don’t have to chat; they can even abstain from the vote, so it’s easy for players like me to let the bigger voices battle it out. Furthermore, influence is so important in this game that I once saw a player get another player voted off simply by stating that they were the Imposter without evidence.
Communication in Among Us has the formal competition element in it. Players compete for influence and leverage communication skills and information. What’s interesting is that this competition is often between all players, not just between Crewmates and Imposters. This is because Crewmates don’t know who is on their team. It might seem odd to pit teammates against each other, but one might consider that the meeting is a separate game, a smaller magic circle within the larger circle of Among Us. These circles are concentric because the state of the game outside of the meeting matters during deliberation, but the meeting follows a very different procedure from the rest of the game. Moreover, “winning the debate” is a different kind of outcome from “fixing the ship” or “killing the crew.” While higher-level goals from the outer circle are still present, convincing everyone you’re right is more immediately important.
Unfortunately, with meetings being such a critical aspect of the game, I miss out on a lot of the “fun” to be had when I sit quietly and abstain my vote rather than experiencing the fun of figuring out the Imposter. To make the game more fun for players like me, I would want to make it easier to engage in the meeting even when others are more assertive. For this reason, I would consider a mute mechanic that stops one player from dominating the conversation. Maybe that is a limit of how much you can type in text chat, or maybe Crewmates can anonymously and briefly disrupt the comms of another player during a limited number of meetings each game. If I wanted to say something in a meeting but a more assertive player was holding everyone’s attention, I could mute them at the start of the meeting to give the rest of the crew more room to discuss.
In Among Us, players are randomly assigned their roles; they don’t get to choose. For this reason, as a designer, I’d want players to be capable of having just as much fun regardless of how they are assigned. Skill is an important aspect in many games, but I think my claims above show that whether or not a player gets to use their skills comes down to some level of chance. Players who are assigned a role that matches their playstyle will probably have more fun than players who aren’t as good at the role they were given. Zooming out, we should consider the indirect implications of the designer’s choices. Among Us creates an environment where some voices are uplifted while others are silenced. Players who have had the privilege in real life of commanding an audience and garnering listeners’ attention will probably be more skilled at influencing others and dominating a conversation. Players who have historically had a less prominent voice continue to be quieted in games like Among Us, a game that asks them to do what perhaps they were never allowed or taught how to do: speak up and take space. My design recommendations tried to address some of this by leveling the playing field and allowing other types of players to succeed in their assigned roles without requiring them to adopt a particular play style they may not be comfortable with.
