I played the mobile version of Among us, which is developed by Innersloth. It is a game that is targeted towards all ages but mainly teenagers and young adults.
In this game you are role playing as crew members on a spaceship with one or two impostors (exact numbers being in ratio of the size of game). Where the crew members win if they are able to complete all the tasks or kicking out impostors while imposters win if they are able to successfully sabotage the excursion by killing or voting out crew members.
I was able to get 5 friends together to play among us, and we were able to experience both playing in a smaller private room of 5 players and also playing in a larger online public room of ten players. This game really made me hyperanalyse the communication patterns of my friend, and also made me question different layers of trust through this online platform, and allowed me to realise that I am significantly more fond in interpersonal face-to-face interactions as opposed to virtual ones.
When I played the 5 person room, all the conversations happened offline and there were even some commentary where I, or some others, would occasionally make an observation about a game mechanic or some commentary about their own actions. Since the objectives of this game is so clear and distinctly different for impostors as opposed to the crewmates, I was extra conscious of how people were acting and since we were friends prior to this gaming session, I would analyse whether their reactions in the discussions or even just casual gameplay was similar or different from the way they typically act. So it was really easy to kick out a friend who was an imposter because he was typically a very talkative person and then for one game suddenly became very quiet. Conversely, another friend who was typically quiet just stayed quiet throughout discussions but because it was not very out of character for him to be quiet, this wasn’t more heavily questioned and he ultimately was able to win the round.
[Figure: Imposter winning because Jonathon was typically a very quiet person]
For each role, there was only one favourable outcome, and by the competitive nature of gameplay, it is natural for people to go to great lengths in order to achieve this favourable outcome and allow their team to win. In my opinion, it makes it okay to lie, and even though we definitely lied when we got the imposter (since that is quite literally the only way we can win) it did not at all sabotage our relationship or trust within each other as a person, because there seems to be a mutual understanding that the lying is insulated within the magic circle of the game and will not extend to the external friendships. Additionally, from the reading, games can have a generative narrative nature and possibly due to the storytelling nature of this specific game where everyone is putting on this fake identity of someone on a spaceship and recounting an elaborate storyline of tasks, actions, motion, and observations, storytelling inherently is a fictitious weaving of concepts and thus alleviating the lying nature when an imposter spins up a fictitious fiction.
It was interesting, however, that for some reason, even though the game should be separated from life, some of the interpersonal dynamics was still able to make its way into the magic circle because when we opened the room up to the wider internet, I still trusted my friends more, partially due to the preexisting relationship I have and the pre-built trust I have with them and partly because of the physical presence feeling more trustworthy than the texts. Even though anyone has equal likelihood of being assigned the role of imposter, there was an arbitrarily high amount of trust I felt towards my friends because of the level of communication with them being so much substantially better than the communication with the other players online that skewed my gameplay towards targeting the people online and voting them out instead of those in the room.
[Figure: Screenshot demonstrating short responses of the text communications and how there are not a lot of information conveyed as opposed to the verbal alternative]
Part of this is possibly a mechanics issue as texting, especially on the mobile version, is so slow and there cannot be as much information communicated in the same amount of time, so discussions that are truly informative will need to be very long as well, which would extend gameplay time by too much. I think a mechanic that would improve this experience would be to add a voice channel option and have game options for people who prefer verbal communications to be able to choose that method of conversation.
On a very small side note, I appreciated a lot of the game mechanics in place that allowed the ghosts to continue their involvement, so even after I died/got voted out, there were options like haunting or continuing tasks and ghost chats that kept me engaged and interested.
[Figure: Screenshot demonstrating myself completing tasks as a ghost]
