Among Us: Mafia During the Coronavirus

02E1BC8541ED342087F054625558E93DAF278CCA (2560×1440) Among Us:

Among Us: Resuscitated by the Pandemic and Murdered by its Abatement

Time Played: 31.4 Hours

Like hundreds of thousands of people, quarantined by the Coronavirus, I first learned about Among Us on YouTube. With the professional Dota scene halted, the algorithm replaced Dota tournaments with Dota players playing Among Us. N0tail and friends only made a half dozen videos. Once I had exhausted those, YouTube recommended Disguised Toast, a professional streamer from Canada. A week into his daily videos, he was famously joined by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in October, 2020. Days later I persuaded friends, who I hadn't seen due to the pandemic, to try Among Us. Since then we've played a two hour session every other week. Over six month we've played with an expanding list of people, currently exceeding twenty-five players, each with their own unique play-style. I've never played in a public match. One aspect which made Among Us popular was the ease of joining a game. Among Us functions across platforms. While I play on a PC, friends play by phone, tablet, or their own computer. The game is also incredibly cheap, $5 on Steam, or free on the phone. Playing on the phone includes ads, but I can not confirm what they look like.

Among Us works with five to ten players (the developer, Inner Sloth, claims they are producing a fifteen person free expansion), though nine and ten are the best numbers. Players are secretly assigned a role of crew member or impostor. Then they are deposited in one of the four maps. The first map, The Skeld, a spaceship, is the original and best. It is perfectly designed for a game of cat and mouse, in space. Mira HQ, a space station above earth, is too small, and is separated into two sections, making it too easy to deduce the location of every player. The third map, Polus, a planetary base, is larger than the first two, and my second favorite. The newest map, which I've only played for three hours, The Airship is much too large for the ten player limit. It will be improved by an increase to fifteen players, when, or if, Inner Sloth updates the game.

On each map the goal is the same. Crew members win by completing tasks scattered about the location. Impostors win by killing the crew members, so they are equal in number. Crew members also win if they eliminate all impostors. The game is spent in silence, except for meetings. The players meet when someone reports a dead body, or presses the button in the meeting room (most matches limit each player to one button press). At meetings players unmute themselves. They have 120 seconds to talk and vote out one player (players can change the 120 second limit, but it seems a sufficient amount of time). Each player has one vote, and can use it to vote out a player (including themselves), to skip voting, or to not vote. There is an important difference between the last two. Skip Vote is a button on the screen, and it counts as a person. Not voting means the player didn't select another player or the Skip Vote button. After everyone votes, the game visually tallies who voted for who (in settings the vote tallies can be changed so voting is anonymous). The player with the most votes is thrown out. They don't need to have 51% votes, just a plurality. If there is a tie, no one is ejected. If Skip Vote has the most votes, no one is thrown out. So it is crucial to always vote, even if just the Skip Vote. I once voted out a player alone, because the other seven players didn't click any option.

The tasks the crew members as tasked with completing are all without text. They are surprisingly intuitive (and creative). Each task requires two to ten seconds, and the longest generates a feeling of anxiety, as you stand passive and helpless, waiting for an impostor to swoop in and kill. As the crew complete tasks a bar in the top left fills up with green (this can be modified to only display at meetings). If the bar fills up the crew wins. The crew almost never win by completing tasks, but they use this to pressure the impostors (the number of tasks can be adjusted to best fit the crew skill level and map. Too few tasks allows crew members to win too often, while too many means they can't pressure the impostors). Impostors are assigned a list of tasks as well. They can't activate them, but they should pretend to perform them. While completing tasks, crew members should look around, scouting for corpses. When an impostor kills, they leave a mutilated body. A crew member who approaches a body can report it, starting a meeting. Impostors can also report bodies. This is called a self-report. In our initial games, people playing on phones repeatedly, accidentally reported right after they killed. To sneak up on crew members the impostors access vents in the ground. They move from one to another silently, allowing them to swiftly cross the map. But their kill cool-down, the time they have to wait before killing again, doesn't go down while they are in the vents. The best way for crew members to monitor impostors, and figure out if they are using vents are the security systems. Different maps feature different systems, but they include cameras to watch part of the map, an administration table which tells the player how many people are in each room, and a heart beat monitor which lets players know who has died. Impostors can also utilize the security systems, to see where the prey is, or learn if an ally killed.