Among Us: the ultimate party game of the paranoid Covid era
There are 10 crew members trapped on a spacecraft, carrying out menial tasks to maintain vital systems, but at least one of them is an imposter who wants to sabotage their work and if possible, murder them. What sounds like the premise of a particularly bleak sciencefiction movie is in fact the set-up of one of the most popular video games of the year. Developed by a three-person team at InnerSloth and launched to virtual obscurity in 2018, Among Us has suddenly become one of the biggest games on PC and mobile, attracting more than 85m players in the last six months. It’s so successful, InnerSloth recently abandoned plans to work on a sequel, instead piling their resources into the original. No one, it seems, is more surprised about the success of this game than its creators.
So why has this happened? Among Us is essentially an online multiplayer version of the party game wink murder, but set on a constantly malfunctioning spaceship. Up to 10 players take part, and at the beginning, you’re told whether you’re an innocent crew member or an imposter. While the former carry out jobs such as rebooting the communications systems or cleaning out the air ducts, the latter stalk the corridors breaking vital equipment or looking for victims to kill.
When a crew member discovers a body, they call a meeting, at which point all the players are allowed to talk to each other for a limited time. During these discussions, the crew needs to try to work out the identity of the imposter(s) by comparing alibis and reporting on which other players seem to have been acting suspiciously: what was Tim doing so close to the scene of the crime, and why can’t Emma recall what task she was apparently working on? Accusations fly, temporary alliances form and whopping lies are told. Sessions can often descend into anarchic shouting matches, with players frantically justifying their movements around the ship. Then a vote takes place, one player is hurled from the spaceship’s air locker, and the others discover if they’ve just saved themselves from certain death or murdered an innocent workmate.
As the game continues, the paranoia ramps up. Crew members can use security cameras to spy on others, while imposters can use air ducts to sneak around. Although there are traditional video game objectives to fulfil – the crew members can win the game if they complete all their allotted tasks before everyone is dead – this is essentially a game about acting; or, more accurately, it’s a game about lying to your friends. (You can play against strangers but it’s not as fun and there are a LOT of cheats out there.) The beauty of the game is the way in which it allows players to exploit the personality traits of their peers, tapping in on the neuroses of anxious players to create plausible guilt scenarios, or flattering egotists so that they don’t suspect you.
In short, this is all the fun of a slightly drunken board game night, but virtual, which makes it perfect for the semi-lockdown situation a lot of us are in right now. Brighter, cuter video games such as Fortnite and Animal Crossing proved popular during the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis, but now, after months of this horror, and with patience fraying, we’re ready for something more cynical and spiteful, something more akin to the end of a game night, where players are seconds from dropkicking the Trivial Pursuit board into next door’s garden.
There is, you may have spotted, something particularly 2020 about Among Us. Its emphasis on fabrication, on blame-shifting, and on reporting other people to the authorities is extremely on point. As writer Sean Sands points out in his excellent Vice article, “Among Us is rife with ever-cascading crises, and people trapped in a sense of isolation while they try to solve problems for which they are woefully unequipped. Into this crumbling world the game introduces a dash of bad-faith actors whose purpose – as much as open violence – is to sow distrust and distraction.”
What Among Us understands, and why it has been such a huge hit (not just to play, but to watch on Twitch, where superstar streamers have contributed to its sleeper success) is that we need recrimination and drama in our social lives. Frankly, when smiley Zoom chats start to grate, Among Us will be there, ready to whisk you into your own private version of The Thing, where the chat isn’t about who’s gotten into sourdough or knitting, but whether or not Kev was the one who sabotaged the oxygen supply and should therefore be jettisoned into the cold vacuum of space. In this age of widespread home working, Among Us simulates the only part of office life that most of us secretly miss: gossip and in-fighting. No amount of Microsoft Teams meetings can ever replicate that drama.
If 2020 is putting a strain on your relationships, Among Us could be the ultimate test – or indeed, the final push.
Among Us is playable on PC and smartphones
turing oneself. Planning to tour it for a year, then take a year’s sabbatical, she thought she had built-in limitations that would allow her to do just that. Yet she succumbed to burnout anyway, ending up plagued by chronic insomnia, a sleeping-pill addiction and strange rashes. “It’s like a domino effect,” she says. “You get caught in a spiral until you realise: this is not working any more.”
Down the line from her Montreal home, Davidson’s Quebecois-accented speaking voice is much warmer than the Slim Shady-inspired persona captured both on that record, and on Renegade Breakdown, the pulsating title track from her fantastic fifth album. That song is a feint: the rest of the album marks a complete break with club culture, embracing the influence of weirdo French chanson artists such as Christophe and Mylène Farmer, synth-prog and off-kilter funk, Marianne Faithfull and Billie Holiday in their grande dame phases. Davidson also sings for the first time, a twisted cabaret croon tracing her final departure from the dancefloor and the damage it wrought her.
She quit on a high, shortly after headlining Berlin superclub Berghain on her 32nd birthday, and only ever doubted her decision when people kept asking if she was scared. “I was like, wait, should I be scared?” says Davidson. Yet she trusted herself. “It was confirmed by my intuition that it was the only way, actually, because there was no way for me to go on the way I was before. My body was talking to me and telling me that it was time to change.”
She is concerned that her decision was framed as bitterness towards club culture: not at all, she clarifies. The problem was that work had become an addiction like all the others she had bounced between: alcoholism and substances in her 20s, anorexia throughout her life. “Often I was confused between my ambitions, my expectations, the expectations of the world around me, my upbringing, my life, my friends, my relationship, my job,” she says. “I think most of us feel that way these days.” During her sabbatical, she realised that she needed to explore new creative horizons: namely the idea for a band she and husband Pierre Guerineau (also her counterpart in the techno duo Essaie Pas) and producer Asaël Robitaille had long fantasised about starting. They named themselves L’OEil Nu (the naked eye), and took inspiration from the records they would play at living-room afterparties.
A self-proclaimed workaholic working during a sabbatical might seem selfdestructive to the point of perversion, but collaborating with old friends offered Davidson a reprieve from the stress and alienation of the solo grind. As the trio crowd around a webcam, they recall meeting at La Brique, a Montreal show space co-run by Davidson and Guerineau, in the early 2010s. It was a cornerstone of the city’s then-buzzy DIY scene: a little-known artist called Grimes rented a rehearsal space there. The trio were more catalysts than stars. “We were the under-under-under of the underground,” says Davidson.
Robitaille describes their 20s as “a long period of exploration, losing ourselves a little bit sometimes, partying hard”. Now all in their mid-30s, they’re “more grounded and back to old loves”, he says – hence the reclamation of music with an uncharitable reputation for being uncool. “When you’re a teenager you hate the French chansons de variétés you listen to on the radio with your parents,” says Guerineau. “Then you get back to it: it’s a part of yourself, of who you are.”
It reflects Davidson’s Jung-inspired belief that humans have a true self and a persona. The latter, she says, is useful. “It’s like the filter – and as an artist, it’s what you decide to show to the world.” The problem comes when you overly identify with the persona and can’t distinguish between the two identities. “What brought me to anorexia was complexes and the relationship with the self and the image and the persona, and what you want to show the world. What the world doesn’t see is the weakness, the fragility, that you try to hide. But of course it shows.”
In parts, the funny, poignant Renegade Breakdown explicitly addresses Davidson’s career overhaul: baroque prog epic Back to Rock finds her literally shunning one genre for another; on the glimmering lounge jazz of Just in My Head, she asks: “Why the music feels lame?” But the deeper core of the album asks whether, beyond altering superficial circumstances, humans are actually capable of real change. Davidson thinks so, “but it takes very hard work and a lot of patience. It’s about getting to know yourself better to make better choices.”
She is getting there. A naturally impatient person, she has been trying to “cultivate empathy and patience”, and putting her foot down with her label about respecting her insistence on working at a slower pace. Her insomnia has subsided. Confronting her eating disorder meant it “eventually took less and less space in my life”. She has revealed her vulnerabilities on record before, but previously they were shielded by the iron-clad girding of industrial techno.
On Renegade Breakdown, they are starkly exposed over wheezing vocals and gothic folk: the airless, ominous Lead Sister examines the poison of perfectionism through the story of Karen Carpenter, with whom Davidson feels a kinship. The song Sentiment is its opposite: her commitment to changing her nature, no matter how hard it is. “I’m not as attached to my persona as I was before,” she says. “So I don’t mind showing my fragility and my wish to have a life that would be a bit more peaceful.”
Yet Davidson admits that it’s only since the pandemic that she has truly slowed down and acknowledged the toll that her old working life took on her body. “Just now, since a few weeks, I’m feeling like I’m getting my health back,” she says. “I even walk slower now.” But this recovered workaholic is pessimistic that the pandemic will lead to a better work-life balance in general. “Capitalism is a strong entity within our world, unfortunately,” she says. “As long as the world is run by big corporations and capitalism and corrupted politicians and big-ego CEOs and marketing, I don’t think that things will change so much.”
She can feel the potential for change in the air, and the resistance against it. But the latter, as she has learned the hard way, is futile.