Among Us Is The Best TTRPG?

Hey folks, I just finished reading Bernard De Koven's 1978 book The Well-Played Game, and in a fever dream of a mindset I wrote two thousand words on Among Us! I hope you like it — I think it can be useful and maybe even a little funny? Anyway, enjoy!

My favorite game is Among Us. This often raises a few eyebrows — it's a popular punchline to jokes online, and one might expect a professional game designer to like more sophisticated games. But at one point or another, since the height of its popularity in 2020, it's served as the emotional and ludological center of my game-playing communities. Now that I've been playing for almost two years, I find it important to sit down and examine what Among Us can teach us about play, community, and tabletop games.

Among Us And Mediation

Among Us is a game about little fellows wearing astronaut suits ("beans" or "amogi") in an alien environment trying to accomplish the silly little tasks that will result in a successful mission. Some number of these beans are secretly imposters — traitors who are playing a unique game which allows them to navigate the map through climbing into the vents, disable or sabotage parts of the game environment, and murder other beans. The entire crew has a responsibility to identify these imposters and eject them from the game. At the conclusion of the game, regardless if the imposters or the crew won, everyone reconvenes back at the dropship, chat about how the game went, and enter into a new round of play.

This is what the game is about — how it is played can vary dramatically. A play community might introduce changes to the game that dramatically alter the play experience. Some of these (such as "crewmates have limited vision" or "no visual tasks") are validated and enshrined by the greater play culture. Others (such as proximity chat and mods, to alternate game-mods like hide-and-seek) fundamentally shift the game's nature. Some shifts (like "don't use medbay" or "don't turn off lights") are social conventions that alter the nature of play without changing the mechanics of the game.

In this way, while Among Us is a videogame, it has more in common with Minecraft or even a party game or TTRPG. The social conventions of the play community, articulated through setting decisions or group consensus, are just as much (if not greater) a sculpting force on the game than the rules of the game itself. Often these rules form in an effort to articulate the group's goals to mediate play. This mediation of community rules becomes a second meta that surrounds the game.

This mediation becomes even more apparent when a group has been playing a game continuously for an extended period of time. In my case, I've been managing a community of Among Us players for nearly two years. It's had periods of seven-hour evenings of gaming, and periods of silence or minimal play. We've experimented with other games, but always we've come back to Among Us. Mediation between a countlessly rotating group of players, some who have played the game a thousand times and others who have only just started playing, is vital to the health of the community as a whole.

We can understand this continuous process of community mediation through Bernard de Koven's analysis of play. In The Well-Played Game, De Koven discusses the distinction between "playing" and "gaming" — two possible mindsets when one approaches a gamestate. These two states often get conflated in theoretical work, but I think his distinction is vital to understand the two competing emotional states that underpin the mediation of Among Us as a play community:

There is a very fine balance between play and game, between control and release, lightness and heaviness, concentration and spontaneity. The function of our play community is to maintain that balance, to negotiate between the game-as-it-is-being-played and the game-as-we-intend-it-to-be. It is for that reason that we maintain the community.

On the one hand we have the playing mind—innovative, magical, boundless. On the other is the gaming mind—concentrated, determined, intelligent. And on the hand that holds them together we have the notion of playing well.

—Bernard de Koven, The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), 40.

If we imagine two players (I'll name them Jonesy and Socks) who both enjoy playing Among Us. Jonesy has no real regard for strategy or winning, and finds joy in the humor of Among Us and the capacity to play with their friends. Socks has a genuine desire to win, to either catch the imposter as crew or slaughter the crew as imposter. If we were to all play the game as Jonesy does (this "playful" mind), it would descend into incoherence and non-game — this could be fun, but Socks would find it alienating, and eventually we would grow bored of Among Us. If we were to all play the game as Socks does (the "gaming" mind), we would become caught up in analysis and "sweaty" tactics, and we would lose sight of the game in our attempts to win the game. Thus, caring for this community requires mediating between both models of play, and ensuring both mindsets have the space to both express themselves and articulate their desires.

Some social rules (like "don't act in the interests of the imposters when you're crew") exist to help Socks. Other social rules (like "don't use mechanical glitches to get unfair information") are there for Jonesy's benefit. There is no optimal way to play Among Us. There is only the continuous process of mediation, negotiation, and experimentation over time to adjust the game to suit the needs of the playgroup.

Among Us and Competitive Cooperation

One might feel tempted to argue that Jonesy has a healthier or "better" perspective on play than Socks does. After all — Jonesy wants to play for play's sake, while Socks is caught up in rules and winning. What that analysis misses is that approaching a game on that game's own terms and striving to achieve within the bounds that games provides is a lot of fun, and that impulse is the heart of what drives the impulse to "game" as a distinct activity from "play." The critical component of that enjoyment requires us to not forget that it is just a game.

In Among Us, a round might take as long as twenty minutes before the game restarts. There is no score, there is no grand tally at the end of who did the best, there's no tournament structure (In fact, attempts to impose a tournament structure onto Among Us has been a miserable affair). This state of perpetual reset means that grudges and tensions are settled and restart. If you deceived me, the slate is wiped clean. After a session of Among Us, the winners and losers aren't the ones remembered. Instead, the strongest memories are the sick plays, the skilled deductive moments, and the funny jokes and goofs.

As each round resets, the narrative of the game resets as well. The "narrative" of a game of Among Us is shaped by those that happen to live and those randomly chosen to be Imposter, meaning that the main characters of each round is arbitrary. Playing Among Us over and over for many hours creates the sensation of a continuously-evolving Commedia dell'Arte performance. In one round, perhaps the best detective and the most deceitful liar are having a battle of wits. Later on, perhaps the group clown is trying to lie their way out of that now-crew liar's discovery, and no one trusts the liar. The heroes and villains shift based on context, and the story's evolution creates the feeling of shared growth and familiarity.

The story is vital but cannot, in my experience, be the center of play. The emergent story must remain emergent, and when it's revealed someone "cheated" the make the story more appealling, I feel cheated. The sensation of being cheated can also come from a too-easy win or a mechanical glitch. Sometimes these "unfair" moments can be solved by bending or breaking rules (either social or mechanical) but sometimes the response is "bad beats" and the game continues.

Thus, in addition to the mediation between play and game, there's also the mediation between the impulse to win and the randomness of the emergant narrative. This leads to the development of a relationship of play I called Competitive Cooperation (or comp/coop), a concept I learned from my time teaching kids at the Wayfinder Experience. In both contexts, Comp/coop is about a state of equilibrium where players are trying their hardest to win, but that striving has less to do with the object of winning itself. We cooperate together to compete in a manner that makes winning feel satisfying and losing feel palatable. People try to win because they enjoy trying to win, but winning and losing are identical states — the important part is, as de Koven would put it, a game well-played.

Applicable Lessons From Among Us for TTRPGs

This final section of the article is a reflection on what us, as tabletop RPG designers, can learn from Among Us an incorporate into our game design process. While some might be obvious or inscrutable, they each represent a shift in our approach to thinking about long-form games more broadly. There aren't many game experiences that are similar to a long-term campaign, and thus campaign design (making TTRPGs designed to last over the course of years) is an area without many shared points of reference. Here's what we can learn:

The game excels, not in spite of disagreement, but because of it.

The Among Us streamer 5up once described his optimal mixture of a 10-player session as "four goofballs, four tryhards, and two wildcards". In any form of play that lasts for years, philosophical disagreements will form between different models of play. Our temptation might be to choose sides, to pick one form of play as superior to another. The truth is that both perspectives are incredibly valuable, and our game design should encourage these disagreements and grant players the tools to productively hold these disputes in tension.

The ritual around the game is just as important as the game itself.

Pre-game chatter, outfit changes, breaks between important moments, and decompression afterwards — all these experiences form the emotional environment that the game itself gets to take place within. Games have done an impressive job prioritizing and organizing these "prelude" moments (character creation, starting rituals, etc.) but most games lack a resolution or decompression space afterwards. How can we model these rituals as formal structures within games themselves?

Prescribed narratives and emergent narratives both have their place.

Some narrative structures (such as the crew vs. imposter tension in Among Us or the structure of storygames like Fiasco) sculpt a prescribed approach to the story of the game that is omnipresent. Other narrative structures emerge naturally, rivalries, grudges, and personalities forming a pattern that shapes the play without any prescription. Designers are often cautious of one of these models, viewing it as a somehow lesser influence on their play experience. A longterm game strives to balance both, with prescribed arcs to embark on over the course of real-life months and the capacity for emergent experiences the designer couldn't predict.

We are striving to create a well-played game.

Competitive and adversarial play are not anathema to TTRPGs. Fairness and appropriate play can shift from community to community. Hard and fast rules in one space are open to shifting and redefining in other spaces. Games serve as environments where both gaming and playing can occur, and the replayability of games is shaped by its capacity to contain both modalities of play, along with many others. Designing one's game with this multiplicity as a core principles will improve your relationship with the game as a whole.

Conclusion

De Koven wasn't thinking about the playground capacity of video games when he wrote The Well-Played Game. Despite this, his words resonate strongly with my experiences playing both Among Us and TTRPGs. The broad sentiment around games in many of the communities I frequent focuses on games-as-storytelling-tools, games-as-simulated-environments, or games-as-interactive-art-pieces. All of these models are interesting, but when I frame Among Us as a digital TTRPG (in a similar category to playing D&D on roll20), then exciting complications emerge. When we utilize games as a mediating mechanism, when we prioritize the continuous process of play as something both directed and aimless, when we discuss openly the tension between the intelligent and focused game mind vs. the creative and careless play mindset, we get a lot closer to understanding what else is possible in the TTRPG world.