Among Us — Communication is Key to a Good Game

It took 2 years for it to become famous

The year was 2018, and game developer Innersloth had released a game nobody had heard of. Two years later, the world found itself stuck at home due to a pandemic, an issue that is persisting to this day, and who the hell knows when it’ll be over, but probably not next year. Regardless, with nothing better to do, everyone started paying attention to this game called Among Us. Nobody knew what was up with it… until everyone started playing it.

Among Us became a hit out of the blue, replacing Fall Guys as the main interest for the remainder of 2020 (saddest part: Fall Guys’ fame was short-lived), even though nobody seemed to care that the game was actually around for 2 years before it blew up. But after that, it was hard to ignore it because people wouldn’t stop talking about it. It’s a cool concept, but Among Us isn’t the first game of its kind; it only became famous because it was at the right place at the right time.

Regardless, that didn’t stop people from making countless memes and parody videos on YouTube. The premise is somewhat simple, too: you play as one of several cartoonish astronauts (of sorts) tasked with doing usual astronaut stuff. Not too complicated, right? But turns out there’s an impostor amongst the crew members, and one side must defeat the other, either by exposing the impostor first or disposing of all the crew members first (it’s basically The Thing). As simplified as this description is (because it could use more meat), this game requires the most wits and tests your social skills since, as the impostor, you are tasked with deceiving other people. This game more or less represents how you would establish your human relationships in real life since you are talking to real people. But unless you speak English, you’re not going to establish anything.

There’s this phenomenon called “teaming”, and it’s really annoying

Typically, Among Us is a game of wits, where the Impostor attempts to trick everyone into thinking he or she is one of them, while the crew have to figure out who among them is the impostor. Of course, this doesn’t apply if you’re playing with your friends on the same sofa. In these scenarios, players have “witnesses” outside of the game as to the Impostor’s identity. So, people say things like “they killed my brother” because they saw it happen on the smartphone next to them, which is being held by “my brother”. This behaviour, which supposedly doesn’t have an official definition, but people often call it “teaming”, ruins the experience for everyone because it virtually eliminates the need to use one’s wits. When I realised that people often rely on this strategy, instead of choosing to have an authentic experience, I stopped playing the game, but I haven’t returned to it because I need to update my smartphone’s software… and I haven’t done it yet.

It’s true that “teaming” is a grand issue with the game, but there’s something else that’s bothering me even more. I noticed that people only ever speak English in the game, but that’s probably just me hanging out in the English-speaking servers too often. My point is, I never see anyone in any game speak Spanish or French or, frankly, any other language you can think of. The game only works if you speak the same language as anyone else. If you speak a different language, there is no game because most of it happens when you’re typing to your alibi or who you think is a sus (you see that a lot in the game).

This limits English-speaking players’ availability and those who speak their own version of broken English. Maybe I only ever saw one person speaking Spanish, but it was such an insignificant moment that I don’t even remember if it really happened. But if I play as the Impostor and speak a language different from all the other players, will it work as an excellent strategy to fool them? I have yet to try that out and will probably never get to it… because I don’t know how to update my phone.

Only English speakers are sus

Putting aside my phone issues, I can’t say what to do with this problem. You should probably stick to your casual server where everyone understands everybody without exception, be it English or Spanish or whatever. I would still like to try out what happens when you pretend not to know the language that everyone is speaking (in most cases, or at least in my cases, it’s English), and then see whether or not people fall for the “dumb foreigner who doesn’t know what’s going on” shtick. Once I complete that, I’ll have a more established idea of how that strategy would work out, but it won’t happen any time soon… or at all.

Are you a Crew Member or the Impostor?

I personally enjoy playing more as the Impostor primarily because I never get to play as the Impostor, and it’s only natural that there would be a higher probability to be a Crew Member, not just for me but for everyone. Anyway, your phone is probably up to date, so you probably know better than me when it comes to Among Us. So I have one question: how toxic is the community? You’re free to answer this question at your own leisure, but you can talk about anything else… as long as it pertains to Among Us.

In Conclusion…

Among Us is a fun game about wits, human dynamics, and who’s smarter than the other. If you’re looking for a game that tests both your intelligence and social skills, then you’d probably want to play it. It’s a cool experience, even though the concept isn’t new, which may or may not be a subject I’ll talk about.

I don’t know if you necessarily need to know English to functionally play the game because otherwise, you wouldn’t understand what the hell’s going on. I suppose someone could give it a try and tell me what it’s like, because until I figure out how to update my phone, I’m not going to play any of the games any time soon, and in case people forgot, I don’t use Steam to identify the Impostor, so that’s not an option either.

Nevertheless, “teaming” is still the worst thing that happened to this game.