For my critical play I played Among Us and it was immediately apparent that the emphasis was on social interaction. There are little things surrounding the strategy of play: for example, as imposter you want to kill someone on one end of the ship and sabotage on the other end, so everyone vacates the area and it becomes really hard to track who was where. However, since everyone’s movements and behaviours in the video game are pre-determined by the mechanics, there are no body language behaviours you can rely on like in a game of poker. Instead, almost all communication is verbal. This game made me quickly realize that I was a really poor liar. Where some imposters thrive off of coming up with elaborate lies or stories to throw off the other players, I realized that I would have more success by pretending to be just a regular crew member who isn’t too involved. This made me realize that perhaps my own communication style reflects something similar, where I prioritize being direct and transparent.
When I first started playing as an imposter, I killed other players as soon as they were alone and the opportunity arose. Pretty soon however, I developed a specific strategy for killing crew members and sabotaging to hide the murders. This reflected a learning process where I started with rather impulsive decision making and eventually came up with a strategy. In the next few games, I realized that having too much of an explicit decision making strategy was actually a flaw. Other players quickly caught onto the fact that I liked to commit my murders that way and it became really easy to figure out I was the imposter. This helped me realize that the community and social interaction centred design of the game made norms a focus. With other players, it quickly became clear that some had favourite sabotages or other things they liked to do. As a result, it became crucial to be self-aware of certain biases we had towards actions and try to counteract them. Some players also weaponized this to their advantage. One very unlucky player I played with didn’t receive the imposter role after quite a few games, and adopted that as a role. He would lament the fact that he didn’t receive the imposter at the start of every game even when he eventually did. As a result the group kind of expected him to complain and grip about the roles that he received.
Beyond the pure social interactions, the tasks that were placed around the ship also ensured that people couldn’t just stay together and buddy up. This guaranteed that imposters had the opportunities to lie and deceive since no one had a perfect alibi. Introducing this uncertainty meant that the discussion after discovering a body was always impassioned and filled with defiant gas lighting.
The act of lying inhabits a weird space in social interactions. White lies are often considered as completely acceptable and often a courteous social nicety, but serious lies that involve deceiving friends or family are viewed as improper. Deceit in general is considered as really unethical because it infringes on the very foundations of trust between people. However, deceit as a mechanism in a game is very different. Similar to a white lie, it has an explicit and functional purpose, and doesn’t hurt anyone. In a game like Among Us, lying is the very basis of what makes the game fun and exciting, and pretty much everyone can agree that lying about not being the imposter isn’t going to do any tangible harm. In this way, games are special because they can take certain unethical behaviours and mechanize them in a way to make it purely functional.
