'Emergency meeting': Is Among Us the new Pokémon Go?

Among Us is a game that has the teens to adults' eyes fixed at their screens in this pandemic.

Developed by an Indie gaming company Innersloth, Among Us is an online multiplayer game that was developed in 2018 but only gained momentum when various gaming industry influencers started online streaming about it during the lockdown in 2020.

The game is a social behaviour deduction game that takes 4-10 players and puts then on a spaceship with different roles and tasks for each player in three different maps — where 1-3 players are designated with the role of impostors (who have to sabotage the tasks on a spaceship and kill other players) and the rest are crewmates (who need to finish the tasks to keep the spaceship running and save identify the impostors to save themselves and their fellow crewmates). The tasks range from swiping your card to navigating the ship, set up in different rooms.

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Truth be told, I have played the game on various occasions too, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. During my adventures, however, I got talking with various other players spread across the three servers — Asia, Europe and North America — and realised that while. I was playing in my free time, a lot of others were getting addicted to it.

This brings me to the main question: Can Among Us be the next Pokémon Go?

Pokémon Go was a Niantic game which took the world bg storm a few years ago and some governments — local and national — even had to impose restrictions and bans on the mobile app. In order to catch the virtual Pokémons, people were walking on the roads aimlessly and either getting hurt themselves or hurting others unknowingly. The situation became grim that several deaths and/or critical accidents occurred due to the addiction of this game.

Then came PUBG, a game for which the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was publically asked if he has a solution to getting rid of the addiction of the popular mobile game. From being a team combat game in which you had to kill your opponent team, it became a hub of betting and the addiction led to children hating their parents and adults losing money due to betting and buying cheat codes.

Pokémon Go and PUBG are the two most recent and popular games that led the mobile-addicted generation astray.

So, can Among Us, too, have that impact? I talked to a 13-year-old from the UK about his experience with the game, and unsurprisingly he told me how much he loved the game. However, he also laughed about how he also dreams about killing other players and revealing a single bone in his dreams. One other 16-year-old girl from the Netherlands told me how she wished she could also call emergency meetings when she doubted someone stole her food.

A mother from Malaysia told me how tired she is of seeing her children constantly be on the phone because of this game, and her 16-year-old laughed and said, "To be honest, I once bumped into a park bench because I was trying to do the calibration task and didn't realise that I was so close."

I have read on various discussion portals online about how many people have started dreaming about running around in the Skeld map or (like that 13-year-old) dream about doing tasks and murdering fellow shipmates. Some have even claimed that they dreamt about being stuck in the loop of swiping the card in the Admin room.

So the real question, I figure, here is if it is these games that are getting the players getting addicted or is it the players of the 21st century who concentrate a little too much on one thing and start getting obsessed about it. In either case, it is advisable to ration the time spent on this game, especially for teens.

US elections 2020

One thing, however, that has benefitted from this game — other than the creative Halloween costumes — is the spirit of voting in the United States.

In the game, when someone is killed, the team gathers around for meetings, or call 'emergency meetings', to discuss which player(s) can be an impostor(s) and whom do the others suspect (aka 'sus'). At the end of the designated discussion time, each player has to vote (or skip) against the player they want to vote out.

This voting method is being used by the youth to popularise the concept of voting a few weeks before the upcoming US elections in which the US President Donald Trump is contesting against his Democratic rival and former Vice President Joe Biden.

The players usually encourage others to vote for the 'sus' player, rather than skipping and losing the game to impostors. Once a player votes, the avatar gets a badge of 'I voted' for that round of discussion.

This game was also recently used by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US Representative for New York's 14th congressional district, to encourage people to vote. She took to Twitter to spread out the message and said, "Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?"

Whether or not the game has had (or will have) any impact on the number of Americans getting registered to vote is not clear. However, like all other things, one can hope.