Among Us

Among Us is a 2018 online multiplayer social deduction game developed and published by the small studio Innersloth, released first for mobile devices and later for personal computers and consoles, in which a group of players aboard a spaceship are secretly assigned roles as ordinary crewmates completing simple tasks or as impostors who must secretly kill crewmates and sabotage the ship while avoiding detection. Discussion and voting sessions between rounds, in which players accuse one another and defend themselves, are as central to the game as its simple task and stealth mechanics. Though it attracted little attention on release, it became a global cultural phenomenon in 2020 after prominent livestreamers began playing it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its format offered a way for people to socialize while physically apart.