02.03.2021 09:00 AM

Among Us Taps Into Our Obsession With Betrayal

The massively popular game gives players the freedom and autonomy to backstab one another—but also build connections.

In September, a small group of friends convinced me to join them in my first few rounds of Among Us. Developer Innersloth’s game had been virtually inescapable at that point, clogging up every newsfeed on all of my social media apps with fan art, memes, and jokes about the cute little space beans. At a time when social distancing is absolutely necessary for survival, we had all created our own Friday-night tradition of turning to games as the connective tissue that binds us together. Among Us felt like the next natural step in that journey.

Love, Death, and Lying in Space

The concept of the game is simple. You and other crewmembers must work together to complete menial tasks aboard a spaceship or on a space station, but there’s one caveat: One or more of you is an imposter working to sabotage all of our hard work by putting the ship in crisis or killing us off one by one. Through brief deliberation meetings, it’s our job to deduce who are the villains among us and evict them out of the airlock before they’re able to kill us all—or, worse—before they can convince the group at large to eliminate our innocent bean compadres in their place.

My first few rounds were maddening in the best way. The thrill of discovering the imposter’s identity increased exponentially every time someone found a body or called for an emergency meeting. Who could get away with all this mayhem and with such ease? And why were we so quick to point fingers at each other during deliberation when we had very little evidence to go off of? With each round, my obsession over figuring out the identity of the imposter grew to the extent that all I wanted was a shot at being the imposter myself.

I wanted to betray my friends and feel good about getting away with it. I wanted that next-level power, to be in control of the fate of my crew. I wanted to be at the center of their attention by pulling the strings. But when it was my turn to be the imposter, I choked: In all my excitement, I accidentally hit my kill button, slaughtering one of my crewmembers in front of too many witnesses. My time as an imposter ended before it even began. And then, we played another round.

It’s almost unprecedented for a game developed by a small three-person team to become so wildly popular two years after its initial release, in 2018. Before being picked up by Korean and Brazilian streamers, Among Us had quite the underground following. It wasn’t until July 2020, when it was picked up by North American streamers sodapoppin and xQc, that it skyrocketed on Twitch, going from a daily average of just a couple hundred viewers to more than 100,000 by the end of August. And in December, it swept up Best Mobile Game and Best Multiplayer Game at the Game Awards.

Its boon in popularity even inspired Innersloth to hire Victoria Tran as its fourth member in November to fill the role of community director. After working in the same role for KitfoxGames, Tran is now in charge of marketing, community engagement, and streamlining communication to Innersloth’s three developers about its latest heavy hitter.

“Games aren’t just a product anymore, they’re creators of communities,” says Tran. “My interests have always lived in how you take these communities and how you make them better or kinder to each other, because they are sort of their own mini societies.”

Betrayal? Check. Self-Determination? Double-check.

The game’s sudden popularity among gamers and non-gamers alike is due in part to streamers, but there’s a lot more at play here. You can attribute much of its success to the coronavirus pandemic and how the game is available in various languages and across multiple platforms. But there’s also something to be said about how the game forces players into two opposing sides and how it emboldens players to do the unthinkable task of betraying their comrades.

Among Us is a social deduction game that pulls inspiration from some of the genre’s earliest predecessors. Clue, a board game in which you piece together a murder mystery while wandering around a mansion, was created in 1949 by Anthony and Elva Pratt after they were forced into isolation during World War II. Mafia, a game in which a group of killers must take out their victims by unanimous voting, was created in 1987 by Moscow State University psychology student Dimitry Davidoff at the tail end of the Cold War. Both of these early social deduction games pulled from real-world fears: that our greatest enemies might possibly be our neighbors, friends, and allies (near or far) and that no one can really ever be trusted. With the reemergence of American isolationism and certain circles clamoring to “make America great again,” there’s a far-too-familiar narrative that’s been building over the past four years in which our enemies are often literally among us.

“I think tribalism is a word that gets used a lot, and I think it’s pretty accurate,” says Jamie Madigan, a psychologist and the author of The Psychology Of Games and The Engagement Game. “As humans, we’re very susceptible to sorting ourselves into tribes and into in-groups and out-groups, like, ‘These are our people, and those people are not our people,’ and so we’re going to have a bias against them, and we’re going to have a bias for people that we perceive to be in our group to the extent that a lot of times agreeing with our group is more important than being correct, even on something very factual.”

When coupling our divisive nature with the collective “cultural trauma” we’re all facing from the ongoing pandemic, a phenomenon we discussed when examining the resurgence of narrative-free games, there’s something to be said about how Among Us really is the kind of game that plays off our instinctual efforts to take sides, passionately defend our beliefs, and come together through one commonly held experience. According to Madigan, Among Us is a great connector because it forces players to take sides from within a very structured experience.

“You're not taking things personally, but you are saying, ‘No, it's us against that person,’ and that’s sort of been like a theme in the last few years, especially as Americans are divided and more polarized than ever,” says Madigan. “This is sort of a safe way to experience those kinds of behaviors in a playful context.”

On its surface, Among Us allows us to turn on one another without any real consequences, but when we start to dig into what makes the game design so effective, self-determination takes center stage.

Made popular in the ’50s and ’60s, self-determination theory suggests people are more motivated to be engaged in an activity if the activity satisfies three basic psychological needs. First, there must be a sense of mastery or progression—we like to feel like we’re constantly improving. Second, there must be a sense of autonomy or the ability to make our own choices. And then there’s the sense of relatedness—that what we’re doing has an impact on other people and their experiences.

“Even if you're firing on a couple of those cylinders, then you can have a really engaging experience,” says Madigan.

No matter which side you end up on—as an innocent crewmember or a sly imposter—markers of self-determination are at play every step of the way in Among Us.

Crewmembers perhaps have the most straightforward route to keeping players engaged, as there are built-in, measurable markers for self-determination layered throughout a crewmember’s experience. Completing the tasks you’re given is the quickest surefire way to win, and a bar at the top of the screen keeps track of the collective progress crewmembers are making so that you have immediate feedback on your progression. If each and every crewmember—alive or dead—can finish their tasks, they win in spite of how much progress the imposter has made.

The tasks themselves provide a bit of autonomy, too, in that you can approach any number of tasks in any order you choose. Each task functions as a minigame, with their own markers of progression. One such task has crewmembers shooting up to 20 asteroids, while another has you running all over the ship to reroute electricity by connecting a series of color-coded wires with matching symbols. You get an immediate sense of satisfaction when you complete these tasks, thanks to cute animations and audiovisual cues that signal your job has been done.

But when applying those same markers of self-determination—mastery, autonomy, and relatedness—to the role of the imposter, your level of self-determination falls into the extreme. Your mastery and progression is marked only by the length of time you’re able to stay hidden as the imposter. The longer you go without being caught, the more you believe you’re doing well even when there’s no guarantee you’re winning. You even have full autonomy in how you approach winning the game. Whether you sabotage the ship, plant doubt in your crewmembers’ deliberation meetings or pick off crewmembers one by one, everything you do impacts the entire outcome of everyone’s game. You are, in effect, puppeteering the entire experience and feeding off of high self-determination.

“Everything you say and do affects the other person's play experience,” says Madigan. “You're not just doing it in a vacuum. You're going through and you're affecting the outcome of that game and the experiences that other people have, and they're going to be talking about you during the meetings, and after the game, and so forth. It really is like a direct connection to other people.”

Want to Win? Embrace Autonomy and Enjoy the Community

The deliberation meetings themselves function as a microcosm for what makes this game work for all parties: Every member has complete autonomy in how they approach every meeting and how they represent themselves. There is a shared experience of agency in how each deliberation plays out.

“That seems like a real-extreme example of that autonomy principle at work,” says Madigan. “You’re not just choosing responses from a menu, right? You’re speaking into voice chat or typing into chat.”

And if you’re not quick to call out someone for being “sus,” you could easily be on the chopping block as chaos unfolds rather quickly with players dropping one-word questions, responses, and suspicions. As the imposter, your best bet is to plant the seed of doubt into what others are saying and let others bandwagon to their own conclusions. This form of persuasion, although deliberate, often goes under the radar as others are so singlehandedly focused on discovering your identity.

“This old adage in psychology is that when we're unsure about something, we look to other people who are similar to us and look at what they're doing to help determine what we do,” says Madigan. “Confirmatory information bias is another kind of well-trod, well-understood phenomenon in human psychology, where we pay more attention to things that support our beliefs and pay less attention to things that don't.”

And by playing others against each other, you are effectively controlling how others react to the situation you’ve created.

“A lot of it often comes down to not just what do you make other people know, but how do you make them feel?” says Madigan. “Do you make them feel smart? Do you make them feel like they can trust you? Do you make them feel like you're their friend? It’s that nuance and handling of those relationships and eliciting those feelings.”

For those who play Among Us, the autonomy piece is perhaps the most attractive quality to the game’s design, and it shows when piecing apart the numbers behind how players win the game. According to Tran, imposters, those with the most autonomy, win 57.69 percent of the time. Of those wins earned by imposters, 35 percent win by killing everyone, while 17.6 percent win by voting out non-imposters. Of the 42.3 percent of crewmembers who win, 38.5 percent win by voting. Only 3.8 percent of crewmembers win by completing their tasks, and only 5 percent of imposters win by sabotaging the ship—evidence that, when given the choice, imposters and crewmembers alike will always scramble to take the game into their own hands before picking the most obvious path to glory.

“The part where you vote someone out or you discuss definitely turns the tide a lot for both crewmates and imposters,” says Tran. “All you need to do is to be able to talk to people, and hopefully be a good liar. And if you're not a good liar, that's OK, too. Because, honestly, people will think you're lying anyway.”

For a game that forces players to scramble for every ounce of control, one would assume that the experience would eventually de-evolve into a chaotic mess with in-fighting. I’m sure some of that exists, but in my experience sides are really only ever drawn when the game is in motion.

This is perhaps true, in part, because there’s a definitive switch that occurs when players are in the lobby before and after matches. In every experience I’ve had so far, the lobby at the center of the game functions as a great equalizer. Players customize their outfits and openly converse with one another, hitting once more on those markers of self-determination. But most often, players congratulate each other on the games played, ask about where they’re from, and carry on conversation that’s independent of the games themselves.

In most cases, those conversations are quick, as the lobby tends to fill up with players eager to start the next round. But in some instances, I’ve managed to establish a bond with players in the lobby that carries over into the game. I’ve befriended complete strangers who, once chosen as the imposter, saved me as their final victim, either because I was hesitant to cast blame on them because of our bond or because it was out of what little loyalty they felt prior to the start of the game.

Although the lobby serves as a functional waiting room between each match, the lobbies have been utilized in Among Us as a means of strengthening the communal experience and building character.

“I think it works because it shifts the goal,” says Tran. “It just becomes its own narrative of low pressure, low intensity, intimacy. When you give a space for people to interact and connect, inevitably you will find people who naturally just tend to befriend each other.”

Currently, the only way to maintain those connections is by providing individual contact information in the game’s chatroom. It’s no wonder then, according to Tran, that the most requested feature by players is a friend system that keeps track of who you’ve played with so that you can reconnect and find each other again whenever you log back in.

“The more repeated interactions you have with someone, the closer you feel to them, even if you've never talked to them,” says Tran. “I think anyone who takes a daily bus route to work before Covid can attest to that.”

Ultimately, connection is key, and providing a space where players are encouraged to take control, even in the slightest of ways, is what makes Among Us so effective. The ability to influence gameplay and the immediate thoughts and actions of other players is what makes being an imposter so compelling. And if the new airship map coming in early 2021 with its updated features is any indication, providing players ample opportunity to achieve autonomy is what cements the future of Among Us.