Sunday morning, I woke up and did my daily “scroll through my phone while I try to motivate myself to get out of bed” ritual. I noticed, not for the first time, a meme about the game “Among Us.” I knew it was popular, and I was vaguely familiar with the characters, who are brightly colored astronauts who look like cute little jelly beans. But despite seeing references to this game for weeks, Sunday morning was the first time I googled it. Twenty minutes later, I played my first game.
You can play “Among Us” on a PC for $5 or your phone for free. You compete with a group of friends, Internet strangers, or a mix of both. In a round of the game, you and up to nine other people are sent to an adorable little space station, where you must complete basic tasks. While you try to do them, some of your fellow jelly bean astronauts are trying to kill you. Every time a body is discovered, the beans try to vote out the killers. If you get rid of them before they kill you all, you win. If you die, you come back as an adorable ghost bean who can finish tasks.
Some of you are thinking, “So it’s just mafia?” Yes. This isn’t even the first time I’ve fallen head first for a mafia-type online game. Back in the late 2000s, my favorite TV network was The N, which mostly played Degrassi 24/7. It was the best. Their website had a bunch of fun flash games, and one was a mafia game called Slasher, modeled after a small town in a horror movie. Neither The N nor its website exists anymore, which is sad. People say the Internet is forever, but I’m constantly saddened by the ways that isn’t true.
[ID: the rainbow jelly bean people from “Among Us”]
Back to “Among Us.” I played three different ways on Sunday. First I just joined random games with Internet strangers. Later in the day, I played with my younger brother and his friends, all of us in a Discord voice chat, which made discussions before votes even more intense. Then, I played with three of my friends and a bunch of randos, who kept coming back for more rounds. After an hour, they felt like our weird acquaintances.
I’ve been thinking about why this game is so fun to play. Part of it is that every turn is different. The logic changes. The visuals are legitimately funny. Gameplay moves very quickly — you can finish a fun game in ten minutes.
But, like many things that have popped off in the last year, its popularity seems interlinked with the pandemic and people keeping their asses at home.
Playing “Among Us” this weekend felt like the first time I’d talked to strangers in …. forever. It was the first time in a long time I had something to gossip about, secrets to keep, drama to decode. It was thrilling in the way few things about quar life are.
My quarantine obsessions have been streaky. I haven’t really baked in months, though maybe that will change with fall weather. As I admitted on Friday, after months of obsession, I play Animal Crossing intermittently now. I watched Survivor almost every day for a month and a half, then basically stopped. But I’m grateful to all these coping mechanisms for helping pass the time during this no good, very bad, terrible year.
So let me know if you want to play “Among Us” with me.