The US presidential election is a couple of weeks away and in a bid to inspire more young people to vote, politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez live-streamed footage of herself playing the popular online game Among Us.
Ocasio-Cortez, commonly known as AOC, tweeted her plans to play the game and invited fans to watch on streaming platform Twitch. At one stage, she had 439,000 concurrent viewers, Twitch's third highest number for an individual streamer to date.
The process mainly focused on her playing the game, but she did take a couple of opportunities to talk politics. She encouraged viewers to vote a number of times, encouraging them to do so as early as possible, and at one stage she spoke to British streamers about the UK's NHS.
She was joined by high-profile gamers, Pokimane, Disguised Toast, and Hasanabi, among others on the game. At one stage, Somalian-American Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar also joined the game with her 17-year-old environmentalist daughter, Isra Hirsi.
Pokimane and Hasanabi responded to AOC's call to play the game on October 19, when she tweeted: "Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I've never played but it looks like a lot of fun)".
Pokimane wrote that "it’d be an honour" and Hasanabi replied: "We're already making a lobby".
How to play 'Among Us'
In a nut shell, Among Us is a game of survival. The game – which can be downloaded and played on a PC or mobile – was released in 2018, but over the past few months has gained more players owing to the pandemic. It's also been streamed by popular gamers on sites such as Twitch, bringing it even more attention.
Each game can host between four to 10 players (the more, the better) and there are three different game maps to choose from, all of which are set in space – two are aboard a spaceship and one is on a planet.
Each player is a crewmate on the spaceship, but two are impostors whose main goal is to kill everyone else before being discovered. The crew can win the game if they finish their tasks or if they figure out who the imposters are and kick them off. The imposters can win if they kill everyone on board or get other players to vote off everyone else.
During the game, crewmates will run around the ship performing tasks while imposters look for victims. After a crew member is killed, if another member stumbles upon the body, they can report it and trigger a meeting between everyone on board.
Here’s when the fun (and deceit) begins, as questions about who was nearby and who saw what begin. This is probably also the part where you figure out which of your friends and family are good at lying. Communication is done through in-game chat or over Discord.
