Among Us: a Game Designer’s Perspective

Among Us, a social deception game that has catapulted itself into success, with about 60 million users playing it each day. Plenty of articles have been written about why it was a runaway success — the contribution of streamers, the pandemic forcing everyone to stay in, and the network effect of inviting friends onboard the ship are some of the oft cited factors.

I will not recapitulate this line of thought. Instead, I will analyze Among Us from a game designer’s perspective, and try to account for why it’s so successful, and simply, why it’s a joy to play.

I think the best version of the game is when you’re on a voice channel (likely Discord) with friends (defined as: people you know and will continue to play with again.), as this leads to the highest engagement and the most rewarding interactions. I hence will analyze the game with this assumption in mind.

Game Objectives

Among Us is an asymmetric game with Crewmates and Impostors.

Crewmates try to launch the spaceship by doing tasks while staying alive. They want to root out the Impostors and kick them out of the space ship.

Meanwhile, Impostors try to kill all the Crewmates, and/or sabotage the ship. There are two win conditions for Impostors: successful sabotage on one of the major ship components, or having the total number of live Crewmates be equal to the total number of live Impostors.

The Impostors look like the Crewmates, except when they’re caught murdering someone or jumping into vents (a fast travel mechanic). When someone is murdered, they leave behind a body. If you come across the body, you can report the murder.

This initiates a discussion phase amongst the surviving members on the ship about whodunnit — if a majority vote is achieved, the unlucky player is ejected out of the ships’ exhaust, to float eternally in the silence of dead space.

The game is largely divided into the game phase (where players can control their cute space suited avatars), and the discussion phase, where players are allowed to communicate. A common adaptation for the game is using voice chat (Discord) to converse during the discussion phase instead of the inbuilt text chat, which leads to plenty of entertaining arguments and accusations.

Among Us: A Lineage

Among Us doesn’t come in isolation: it is descended from a long lineage of social deception games such as Mafia (1986) and Werewolf, which appear in various forms — be it as board games, games on Telegram bots, custom games in Real Time Strategies, or a game requiring no physical artefacts whatsoever.

In Mafia and Werewolf, the game is split into days and nights. In the day, players can decide on who to lynch (kill). However, at night, only the “Impostors” (Mafia, or Werewolves) get to act.

These social deception games also featured many of the mechanics that makes Among Us a strong game: effective use of imperfect information to create tension in the game, forcing players to continually update their mental models of other players with new information (learning), and allowing players to engage in inquiry and deception.

Real Time: An Innovation in Social Deception

However, Among Us’s crucial innovation is artfully introducing a real-time dimension. Instead of day-night phases, it has the main game phase, and then the discussion phase. Both Crewmates and Impostors have roles to play in both the game and the discussion phases, which leads to high story-richness (percentage of interactions in a game that are interesting to other players.)

Even in death, players can float around as ghosts and spectate the game, and have a role to play — any tasks they complete will progress the launch of the spaceship. Impostors can continue to sabotage the space ship, delaying the progress of the Crewmates and potentially setting up their teammate for a kill.

Players can get incredibly invested in the game. Being killed can be an immense shock (“IT WAS THEM ALL ALONG!?!?” — this is served very well by the varied killing animations and sounds that play upon death, which add to the surprise that players feel. It is not uncommon to see players float around and watch the Impostor that murdered them move around the map — after all, they might learn something yet from their gameplay.

With friends, the effect is heightened. The tension comes to a peak as players begin to have more information to piece together (and more opportunities to discover who the Impostor is.) As a result, players have high story-engagement even in death as they care about the drama unfolding in-game. They become an all-seeing eye, (by way of Schopenhauer), and experience a spectatorial pleasure.

An aside: this is a great example of not having to have complete narrative fidelity when designing game mechanics. No one points out the ‘ghost’ mechanic as ‘unrealistic’: it serves the game, and that is that.

Challenges and Skill Caps

Among Us has a brilliant solution to the problem of balance in an asymmetric game: allow players to balance their own games instead!

This removes friction because the game developers have freed themselves from having to make ceaseless balance tweaks to the game. Players can select from a range of parameters depending on the group they’re with, as well as the size of the group, ranging from how many tasks need to be accomplished, to how often an Impostor may kill an enemy.

When in doubt, a room host may click on ‘Set Recommended Settings’ to live by the default.

Because the Impostor is randomised each game, the host is incentivised to have it fairly balanced.

Depth, Learning and Fun

Depth and learning appears in two forms: (1) understanding the mechanics, (2) understanding and evolving to adapt to the tells of other players.

Raph Koster, the author of A Theory of Fun For Game Design, argues that fun is just another word for learning. In Among Us, learning comes not just from learning the basic game mechanics (how to move, how to do tasks); we also learn the behaviour patterns and responses of the different players in the game as they work to defend their innocence, or deceive other players.

After multiple games together in a group, you can begin to observe different dynamics emerge as players adapt their Crewmate and Impostor strategies. Impostors may vouch for Crewmates so that Crewmates feel reciprocity and defend them. Impostors may report bodies themselves to allay the winds of suspicion. Crewmates may spend time sitting on the cameras, and play “Detective” by asking questions during meetings.

Among Us can get incredibly tense because of imperfect information and yomi.

‘Yomi’, as interpreted by David Sirlin, is “the Japanese word reading, as in reading the mind of the opponent”.

Tucker Abbott, GamaSutra

For most of the game, players are in the dark with limited vision, and cannot observe other players, and can only hear about what other players say from the team meetings. But an Impostor would say what a Crewmate would say, wouldn’t they? With this limited information, you’re expected to hold the fate of a fellow Crewmate in your hands.

Even what players share may not necessarily be the truth: an Impostor may accuse someone towards the end and claim they took a “vent” (an Impostor only mechanic that allows you to fast travel around the map undetected), which may be enough to sway the game towards the Impostor’s favor.

This is Yomi. According to Tynan Sylvester, Yomi is an “intense and intimate form of mental conflict”, that emerges as you learn to evaluate well. In Among Us, Yomi can be seen in the evaluation of various facts and the trustworthiness of different players.

Yomi works in generating exciting gameplay because “the real world is fuzzier than math”, and this pushes the skill-cap of Among Us into astronomical heights. In short, Yomi is the art of continuously evaluating the situation of other players and keeping your emotions in check as you strategize.

Time pressure contributes to the overall atmosphere of tension: Impostors have to kill fast enough so that Crewmates don’t finish the tasks, and Crewmates have to strategize and coordinate with limited information, making tradeoffs between sticking together and completing their individual tasks.

Because the randomness and new challenges (Yomi) emerge from other players, Among Us provides continually new and engaging gameplay that keeps you on your toes as you have to constantly reevaluate your gameplan given new information.

Next, I will analyze one of the mechanics and demonstrate how it leads to powerful aesthetics (Feelings!) for the player.

Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics

Take this simple mechanic: When a task is completed, the progress bar goes up. The progress bar is available to all players.

Combine this with the fact that Impostors cannot do tasks — they can only fake doing them. Suddenly, this creates a dynamic where Crewmates can use this as a mechanism to ‘verify’ and vouch for other Crewmates. Players can improve their knowledge of the game state as the game progresses (Cyan is NOT an Impostor, but Red Sus! (Is Suspicious)), and most importantly, communicate and convince other players using this mechanic as evidence.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1313073192119029761

As a result, Impostors feel like they’re in a race against time, as other players confirm each other. Crewmates feel rewarded for paying attention to the task bar, and for sticking together with other crewmates as they can accomplish their tasks safely. All this from one mechanic!

The best part is that dynamics can give rise to other dynamics: when impostors realize that for example, players are observing them, they can instead run elsewhere or pretend to be doing a multi-part task. In the discussion phase, lying and pretending can happen on the fly for the impostor.

These mechanic leads to player archetypes such as the “Detective” arising. Detectives take it upon themselves to interrogate every other player for their alibis — ranging from questions about what task the person was doing, to what were the exact details on the task. Be prepared for a real grilling — and sometimes, even as a Crewmate, you could easily be ejected for not being able to answer in time.

However, because every strategy is rewardable-punishable, it makes accurate reads very rewarding — nothing feels better than ejecting an Impostor because you made a good call on where they were (and weren’t!), despite their claims.

The game leads to tremendous depth and richness in interaction, that emerge from simple mechanics. I have only analyzed one, but there are plenty of other game mechanics such as sabotaging Lights (and plunging the world into darkness, where Impostors may roam with impunity), sabotaging doors, and security cameras that all contribute to the overall tension of Among Us.

Because there are myriad ways to attain knowledge, players can experiment every game and refine their mental models of the game state over time. This keeps them engaged up till the end.

The Joy of the Social

Because you need a certain amount of players to have a good game, players are incentivized to invite friends along for the journey.

The game has a low barrier to entry: it’s easy enough to download and most anyone has a mobile phone these days that can run Among Us.

Players are quickly brought up to speed on the game by their friends. Players are incentivized to educate other players on how to play well as a Crewmate / Impostor. Crewmates are incentivized to teach their fellow Crewmates how to play and how to spot Impostors.

Why do players onboard their friends? Well, it is the simple pleasure of seeing your friends in various lights (lying, acting innocent, acting cheeky when they’re the Impostor)— the banter that is emergent from the game mechanics. This makes you want to play with your friends in real life 🙂

Multiple Modes of Pleasure

It can feel just as engaging to watch your favorite streamer play this game with their friends, and one can be just as invested floating around as a ghost and watching the players discuss. There’s a form of dramatic irony created when a dead player gets to watch the Impostor lie through their teeth about where they were, which can be incredibly satisfying (like watching Romeo and Juliet on stage, and Juliet asleep, while Romeo… well…).

Among Us allows varying modes of experience — one may spectate it as a ghost, stream it and get audience input, or play it and experience it directly. I suppose one may also experience it by writing an article on its game design, but I digress.

Further Avenues

There’s plenty of other avenues that are interesting to explore about Among Us for me: how it monetizes (unobtrusively, and with cute hats), potential improvements towards the game (I’m happy to suggest some, but perhaps in a future article), in depth breakdown of the mechanics, and even an analysis of the UI.

I’m glad I finished this article — I hope you enjoyed the read, and if you did, feel free to connect with me on twitter @ryanmyfoo or LinkedIn and we can talk more! I’m open to suggestions on how I may improve this article, for future edits, as well as clarifications.

I’m also looking towards a potential career in the games industry, so if you’re someone working in games I’d love to get in touch with you and learn more!