I played 7 matches of Among Us by InnerSloth on mobile (Android), first released in 2018. This game pits impostors against a crew of astronauts trying to maintain their ship, resulting in one of two outcomes for each side winning. All players are able to summon a meeting when next to a dead body, with a roundtable discussion/argument ensuing, making this a bluffing game similar to Mafia or Werewolf. I tried to have a direct communication style while playing this game as a crewmate, like I do in Mafia/Werewolf, probing accusations for their veracity and exposing any contradictions to the rest of the crew. But as you’ll see, while the basic mechanics of the game led me to this strategy, the specific chat mechanics the game now has severely blunted its effectiveness.
As a crewmate, I have to root out the impostors as fast as possible since they keep killing other crewmates (and can even kill more than one in between elimination rounds depending on how long it takes someone to find and report a body). The key resource in this game is information, and after the first round there is usually not enough of it to eliminate an impostor, but it usually provides crucial information for the next round. For example, if I see that player A says they saw player B kill the victim, and if player B is voted out and shown not to be an impostor, I can have pretty high confidence that player A is an impostor and point this contradiction out in the next round.
Fig 1: I’m an engineer, so I dressed like one, but I had to use a randomized name. That’s kinda lame, but I do like “overtsnail”.
So when a body was reported or an emergency meeting was declared (both allowing players to chat and vote someone out), I would try to ask probing questions so that players would explain their accusations. However, to my horror, the in-game chat system in Among Us now only uses pre-made message options that you have to navigate through a menu to choose from. The last time I played this game (probably four years ago), you could type whatever you wanted! The game is meant for all ages (except for very young children because there is some cartoonish violence, so it is rated E10+), so I imagine this is to circumvent people from saying nasty and disturbing things, as often befalls online games. But wow, this workaround is awful. If someone made an accusation using the chat menu, saying “<player A> is an impostor”, I was limited to selecting “Why?” as my probing question. The elimination round is timed, so I didn’t have much ability to piece together more complicated questions or statements using the chat menu, for which the potential depth is very limited anyway. This overly simple chat mechanic led players to simply spamming “<player A> is impostor”, or “<player A> killed <player B>” over and over as their only means of attempting a persuasive argument.
Fig 2: Pre-selected chat options! Ewww!
Fig 3: A masterclass in persuasive argumentation, rebutted with my brilliant probing question that turns the argued premise on its head.
It’s possible that this lobotomized chat mechanic only applies to online matches with open lobbies (as opposed to local lobbies), and that it only affects mobile players (who are probably more likely to be children than PC players), but it’s still too non-functional. During one game, a specific player made a new accusation each round and the player they accused was voted out each time, despite each time it being revealed they were not an impostor. I tried to point this out and would normally type “This guy’s accusation was wrong last time! They’re probably an impostor” or “This guy has made two wrong accusations IN A ROW! They’re CLEARLY the impostor!”. Instead, I was limited to selecting “<player A> is suspicious” or “<player A> is impostor”, and the players kept blindly following their accusations, resulting in us being defeated by the painfully obvious impostor.
I suspect that the other players were young children, because they really should have realized that behaviour was suspicious. What really sealed this suspicion for me was that, in the one match out of 7 when I was an impostor, I simply sabotaged the oxygen system immediately and none of them fixed it before the 30 second countdown completed despite a big arrow directing all players to it. So the clock ran out and killed everyone, allowing me to win with zero effort. Surely if the players were bots they would have automatically fixed it! But none of the ten players did.
Fig 4: How is nobody fixing the oxygen system?! They’re just letting me win?!
Fig 5: Wow, that was easy.
With this new chat system, bluffing, what should be the core of this game, is made trivially simple. This leads to a playerbase of small children, meaning the core dramatic element of challenge is gone. Without the lively, engaging bluffs and accusations of Mafia, Among Us is just a set of boring task minigames and dice rolls. Choosing preselected chat options with anonymous players made me realize how much the fun of Among Us came from it being a social mediation game. It was fun because the bluffing and accusations were fun, but particularly because it was a fun party-style game to play with friends during the Pandemic. Playing it online with random people that I can’t meaningfully talk to would probably always be doomed to failure.
Ethics response:
Lying as part of a game does not constitute a wrong action because it serves a fundamentally different purpose than lying in real life. When a game includes lying as part of its design, such as in a bluffing game like Mafia or Among Us, this facilitates the fun had by pretending to be a detective and engaging with the challenge of rooting out the secret assailant. Lying here is the impostor’s key gameplay tool and is not fundamentally different from someone blocking a throw during a game of basketball? Was it rude for a player to swat the ball out of the air after you threw it, just because they ruined your basket? No! The other player was just defending their score in this fun game you both agreed to play.
Outside the magic circle of the game, lying violates the baseline trust we have in one another. It has obvious negative consequences, facilitating manipulation and destroying relationships. Lying in a game that is based on lying doesn’t violate trust because the game is a world unto its own with no expectation of truth telling. Because no reasonable expectations are violated, and because it makes the game fun, lying is not a wrong action as part of a bluffing game. There is no credible reason to think that players will become confused (maybe with an exception for young children) and feel that the game normalizes lying in real life. Such is the magic circle’s power!
