Emergency Meeting: there’s a lot of hate speech Among Us

One universal effect of this ongoing pandemic has been the migration of most of our daily activities to a virtual setting. Online activities have taken over, as people find newer and newer ways to cope with the stress of not being able to freely interact with their loved ones in person. Leisure, too, has migrated online with the online gaming industry seeing a massive boom in both the number of players and the number of games. Just ask the makers of Animal Crossing, the first online game that took off during the pandemic.

However, not all is well in the online gaming world. There, a familiar problem is rearing its head — that of offensive and hateful speech. Hate speech in online games is not a new phenomenon, indeed it’s been around for about as long as the industry itself. There have been several attempts to understand why online gaming is such a breeding ground for such comments, and those studies have also come to various conclusions to explain this phenomenon. But no matter how much we understand about why the problem exists, there’s precious little that we can do about it. Really, the only way that hate speech in online games can be curbed is if a player making hateful comments is reported and the authorities behind the game serve a ban or some other form of preventative punishment to that player. While that is never enough to surely prevent hate speech, even from that one person, it’s maybe some progress. Which brings us to games that don’t even have the room for that.

Among Us is an online mobile multiplayer game that has been around since about 2018, but its popularity exploded in the past month or so. Simply put, it is a 5–10 player game with 1–2 “impostors” on a spaceship (at least, that’s the most popular of the three playable maps). The impostors try to kill the crewmates and the crewmates either try to complete all their tasks or vote out the impostors. It’s really an online version of Mafia, except it has become a lot more addictive in this current version. The game is free to play on phones through an app on the Android or Apple app stores and costs $5 to download through Steam on PC. It is incredibly easy to play, so much so that the game doesn’t even come with any kind of mandatory instructions or tutorial the first time a user enters the app. The tasks are self-explanatory, and there are some big red buttons that need no further elaboration.

However, much like most online games, Among Us is not exempt from players making offensive and hateful comments. This is especially common in the game’s “Public” mode, where players can randomly join open games that have empty slots in them. Such a game where very few people actually know each other outside the game and where there are no real consequences of hate speech are locations where such comments thrive. Common examples include asking the player with the witch hat to be burned, using the n-word or being otherwise racistly accusatory of the character with the black avatar, racist remarks towards character names that sound Asian/Hispanic, and others.

There are a few key points that make Among Us even more prone to hate speech than other online games. Firstly, there is the fact that to play the game on the app, the user needs no form of account verification. Most games as for some form of verifiable information such as email or phone number linking other social media, at which point a method of user verification in the form of entering a generated code sent to the user is required. Among Us circumvents that by simply not requiring any form of user verification at all. The game also does not employ any form of permanent or semi-permanent username which may be kept track of. Instead, it allows the user to simply enter a player name (even allowing blank player names) each time. While these decisions might the game a lot lighter on the backend, it does not allow for any form of user accountability. It is for this reason that there is no way to report a user for inappropriate or hateful comments because any user being reported cannot be identified by any form of verified information.

Another aspect of Among Us that leaves it vulnerable to become a ground for hateful content is the fact that the game does not make users sign or agree to a User Agreement when the user downloads the app for the first time. A User Agreement is often a gaming company’s biggest weapon to counter offensive or hateful material by a user. For reference, let us consider the other big online game during the pandemic: Animal Crossing. Obviously, there is a massive difference between the makers of the two games. While Innersloth LLC, the makers of Among Us, is an indie game company, Nintendo, the creators of Animal Crossing, is one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry for the past several decades. For this reason, holding Among Us to the same standards as Animal Crossing may seem unfair. However, Animal Crossing has a fairly comprehensive User Agreement, which can serve as an inspiration to the folks over at Innersloth LLC. Specifically, clause 6.6(c) of the User Agreement for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp says that “Nintendo may scan, access, use, monitor, delete, disclose, or preserve information … to prevent potentially illegal or offensive activities”, something that Nintendo can possibly leverage to combat hate speech in their forums. Nintendo also has a general Code of Conduct currently in place that users have to sign stating that while playing Nintendo games, users will not be “engaging in or promoting any discriminatory, defamatory, hateful, obscene, physically dangerous, or otherwise illegal, fraudulent or objectionable conduct”. While these are by no means guaranteed to prevent hateful speech in its users, it’s definitely a start in the right direction, and I believe that Among Us could use some form of User Agreement in order to address the current ease with which users are able to post offensive speech on the in-game chat.

However, there are definitely encouraging signs that the folks at Innersloth LLC are taking this problem of hateful speech in Among Us seriously. In their recent blog post announcement for Among Us 2, they stated their commitment to curbing hate speech in the new version of the game. They promise the new version to have “fewer hacks, a report button, moderators, etc.” and as somebody currently hooked on Among Us, I personally cannot wait to stab innocent crewmates in a hate-free setting, and continuing to get away with it by saying “Red sus”!