Some of my hometown friends and I played a game very similar to Among Us entitled Goose Goose Duck. It is very reminiscent of it because you are running around a 2d map across different rooms, trying to determine who the secret murderer is. Some things that differentiate it is that it natively comes with features only seen in Modded Among us like: Proximity voice chat, each player getting a special role with abilities, and multiple teams including a neutral evil role. I find modded Among Us and Goose Goose Duck to scratch more of an itch I have for playing mafia style games like Town of Salem, with the added interactivity of being in a dynamic map that is so fun in Among Us. In my opinion, the game gains a lot of replay value whenever the combinatorics of the amount of unique distributions of roles increases a lot, and I think the chaos inherent in having a lot more possibilities really adds to my enjoyment of the game, irrespective of whether or not I ‘like’ my current role.
To answer the prompt about my group dynamics: In what ways did your experience playing this game highlight aspects of your own communication style, decision-making, or role within a group, I think it highlighted the fact that I derive maybe a little bit *too* much pleasure in being deceitful. I am the type of player to go down with the ship if the ship were my own lie, and I think that this probably stems from my drama background of doing musical theater for 5 years. I think another aspect of my gameplay that becomes apparent is that as a computer scientist, I am a logician in the way I internalize the ‘detective’ roleplaying as a constraint satisfaction problem, where I am seeking to gain enough intel to solve the mystery at hand (or mess with the information if I am seeking to hide my own crimes in chaos). I think in previous groups that I’ve played with, it can sometimes feel overbearing for other players if there is just one person taking the game incredibly seriously, so I also do try to hide my conclusions behind a layer of mere suspicion.
As for the ethics question and the impact of lying and being rewarded for lying in among us, I do think it’s important to note that lines can sometimes be blurred in these games and people’s real-world feelings can be impacted by the manner in which they are communicated to/about in these games, and the trust they are given, so I do think it’s important to have an underlying level of respect between all players of the game and not let misinformation tactics (like talking over someone else) be abused repeatedly by only certain players. As for the morality of lying, I think that acting is a skill in itself that is fun to explore in these narrative team-based games, and I think there’s not an inherent issue in lying in a non-consequential context, so long as there is a distinction of what the boundaries of the game are. I remember early in my freshman fall playing Among Us, there was someone I had a crush on in my friend group that I played with. There was one round in which I gave it my all to convince her that I was an innocent soul, that I staked all of our personal trust in each other to the fact that I was not the impostor, and she chose to trust my plea. I felt such glee in winning the round, but she actually felt hurt by the way I demonstrated my ability to manipulate and deceive, and so we stopped being close friends in that way. I took this as a lesson to be more easygoing with my approach to social deduction games, and only increase my level of tryhard-ness and drama if it suits the group I am playing with.
