Among Us
Among Us is a video game released by Innersloth. It is an online multiplayer social deduction game. While initially released in 2018 to little mainstream attention, it received an influx of popularity in 2020 due to many well-known Twitch streamers and YouTubers playing it. In response to the game's popularity, a sequel, Among Us 2, was announced in August 2020. However, a month later in September, the planned sequel was cancelled, with the team instead shifting focus to improving the original game.
Gameplay
3 to 9 players are crewmates. Their job is to complete tasks and find and eject the impostors from the ship. 1 to 3 players are impostors. The Impostor's role is to sabotage and kill everyone onboard. The Crewmate's role is to do tasks and try to figure out who the Impostors are. When the players find a dead body, they can report it, and a meeting is called. The impostors must lie and blame others for the murder. If someone sees an impostor go into a vent or they have other reasons to believe a player is an impostor, they can call an emergency meeting.
The Crewmates win by completing all tasks before being killed or by finding and eliminating all the Impostors. For the Impostors to win, they must either have a sabotage countdown run out or kill enough Crewmates such that the number of Impostors is equal to the number of Crewmates. Ghosts help their living teammates by completing tasks (as a Crewmate) or performing sabotages (as an Impostor). When an Impostor performs a sabotage, either there is an immediate consequence (such as all the lights being turned off or doors being closed) or a countdown begins. In the latter case, if the sabotage is not resolved before the countdown finishes, the Impostors win. Sabotages can be resolved by living players in varying ways depending on which sabotage is performed.
The Impostors must lie and deceive during meetings in order to not get caught. It is possible for Impostors to report their own kills (self-reporting). This can increase the Crewmates trust in the Impostor, or do the opposite. The Impostors can go into vents that take them to other locations in the ship to hide, run away, travel faster, or help with kills, but if the Crewmates see this, they know they are an Impostor and can call an emergency meeting to vote them off.
While the host can choose to have up to 3 Impostors, the usual settings are 4-1 Crewmates to Impostor. The 2 most played setups are 5 players, 1 Impostor, and 10 players, 2 Impostors. As you can't have more than 10 players in a game, there is no way to play with 3 Impostors that is considered balanced.
Issues with cheating
Because the game is mostly client sided, it is very easy to cheat. Cheats in this game include always being an Impostor, no kill cooldown, seeing who is the Impostor as a crewmate, wall hacking, and ESP. There is no anti-cheat, making cheating even easier. While it is considered pointless to cheat as there is no 'score', people still do.
On October 21, 2020, someone by the username Eris Loris created a large number of bots to join every game and spam the message 'You're mad, I'm back. Subscribe to Eris Loris | Vote TRUMP 2020' as well as his Discord link, which was banned within 4 hours. Innersloth shut down the game within 48 hours, and made a tweet documenting the situation. Eris was later doxed, with his address, phone number, and email leaked.
