Imagine wanting to play an online game with your friends, but instead of working together, you start getting competitive and increasingly more desperate to win with every passing second. Well the game that you are thinking of is called Among Us, and it’s actually a lot more fun than you might think and not as unpleasant as it sounds. The game starts, revealing if you are an imposter or a crewmate. There are either one, two or three impostors and you can play with up to 10 people. The goal as a crewmate is to either win by having every crewmate complete their tasks they have around the map or by voting out the impostor(s) in discussions called by pressing the meeting button in the cafeteria or after finding a dead body. In order for the impostor(s) to win, they have to kill every crewmate on the ship by either voting or actually killing them. Impostor(s) can use sabotages to help them kill crewmates, delay crewmates from completing their tasks, or stop crewmates from calling meetings. Imposters can also use vents to get them from one place to another, using them to leave a crime scene or to hide and wait for someone to kill.

Among Us has the attention of students, online streamers, and Youtubers with it suddenly blowing up on the internet. But teachers and parents may start to worry that this could be students number one priority instead of schoolwork. Luckily, this isn’t the case as most people won’t really have a change in their work ethic with their schoolwork.

“While I believe it will change the number of distracted students in class, it will not have even close to a large effect,” Alexander Alfieri, a sophomore at Imagine Prep Surprise said. “It will remain contained to small instances.”

Students will only play this if they normally don’t pay attention or don’t feel like they need to pay attention because it’s an easy lesson. 

Among Us has been out for about two years but has been getting light shined on thanks to twitch streamers and youtubers.

“I first heard it from Youtube,” Alfieri said. “Actually scratch that, Twitch.”

Students started seeing that popular streamers were playing the game and started to give it a shot, seeing that their favorite content creators were having fun. Even as a simple game, it went a long way because it was easy to understand and had mechanics someone could grasp in a couple of games. People like the many different aspects of the game.

“My favorite thing is that you can play with up to 10 friends,” Angel Eriksson, a senior form Imagine Prep Surprise said.

Being able to play with friends is one of the many good things about this game, because playing with random strangers can lead to more stress and you may not have as much fun than when you play with friends. There’s also a rush of adrenaline when you play, like if you’re an impostor and you pull off a really risky kill completely avoiding getting caught. 

Although Among Us has the attention of many people around the world, you shouldn’t start growing gray hairs thinking about how students would rather spend their time playing this game rather than paying attention in school. So don’t stress if you think that your student isn’t paying attention in class because if they’re usually a responsible student, they will most likely not be playing this during class. But do keep an eye out on your student if they typically don’t pay attention during class because chances are, this might be one of the games your student choses to focus on more than their classes.