‘Among Us’: Everything to Know About the Kids’ Game Luigi Mangione Played in 2020
Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man arrested and charged with the Dec. 4 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has many hobbies. Friends of his say he led a book club in Hawaii, where he lived, regularly rock-climbed at a gym in the city of Kaka’ako, and, according to NBC News, played Among Us, the multiplayer social deduction game mostly aimed at children, with several of his Ivy League classmates.
It’s that last bit of information that’s the most intriguing, thanks to an NBC News piece calling Mangione’s Among Us connection “extremely ironic,” given the game’s premise. As the article describes, in the 2018 game, “some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.” It does not offer any more details about the game, opening up the floor for discourse about whether or not Among Us (which, according to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, is appropriate for children 10 and older) could be some kind of training ground for a cold-blooded, real-world killer.
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In reality, anyone who has played the game, which was developed by indie company InnerSloth, knows it’s a rather silly, lighthearted multiplayer game — so innocuous that back in October 2020, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar played it on the streaming website Twitch to help encourage younger voters to get to the polls. It’s a wildly popular game (at its peak it reached over 400,000 concurrent players on the digital storefront Steam) that’s available on every major modern platform, including Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC, and mobile devices (the last of which offers the game for free). The gameplay is simple and all you really need is one of the aforementioned devices and an internet connection to enjoy it. Here, a look at what Among Us is, Mangione’s interest in the game, and why it’s important that some onlookers have seized on this detail.
What is Among Us?
In a typical game of Among Us, a group of four to 10 Crewmates (armless cartoon astronauts in a rainbow of colors that can also wear a variety of silly hats) attempt to complete assigned tasks on their spaceship while trying to determine which of the players is an Imposter, via social deduction. An Imposter’s goal is to kill off the Crewmates one by one until they’re the last player standing, but if they attract too much attention (i.e.; lingering in places they shouldn’t or spotted running from the scene of a murder), the Crewmates can call for a vote and cast the Imposter out into space. During the voting process, Crewmates can plead their case, which can often lead to the wrong player getting voted out, allowing the Imposter to kill again.
Among Us is reminiscent of the iconic party game Mafia, and John Carpenter’s legendary sci-fi horror film, The Thing. It’s won several awards since its debut, including Best Mobile Game and Best Multiplayer Game at the 2020 Game Awards. Among Us’ popularity skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many popular Twitch streamers played it in groups. During that time, Among Us spawned several internet memes: popularizing the term “sussy” and “sussy baka” (plays on the English word “suspicious” and “baka,” the Japanese word for “fool”), shortening the game’s name to “amogus,” and sharing pictures of real-world objects that bore resemblance to Crewmates to playful suggest that there were imposters among us everywhere. In June 2021, as reported by The Verge, a McDonald’s chicken nugget that resembled an Among Us Crewmate sold for just shy of $100,000 on eBay.
Mangione’s gamer history
According to NBC News, Mangione was in a group of Ivy League gamers at the University of Pennsylvania who played Among Us together. Classmate Alejandro Romero spoke to the outlet, claiming he was a member of Mangione’s Discord group, an instant messaging social platform often used to coordinate multiplayer game sessions.
“I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us,” Romero told NBC News. “As soon as his photo and name popped up on X, my friend texted me asking if I knew him, and then either I was calling some 10 friends or they were calling me.”
Among Us isn’t the only game Mangione appears to have played. According to Wired, an Xbox account associated with the recently charged killer showcases a game history including Call of Duty, Halo, and Gears of War, all popular shooter games with millions of players worldwide.
Mangione, who holds a master’s degree in computer science, also reportedly worked as an intern on 2K Games’ wildly popular strategy game, Civilization IV. According to his resume, shared by journalist Ken Klippenstein, Mangione fixed over 300 bugs in the game during his time there.
Video games have always been a scapegoat
Even though Mangione was clearly, at one point in his life, a regular gamer, attempts to connect his gaming history with the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO are tenuous at best. As Riley MacLeod at Aftermath points out, combing Mangione’s gaming history unearthed a rather “regular” pattern of gameplay that millions of Americans mirror.
And despite the media’s obsession with discovering a connective thread between violent video games and real-world violence (like President Donald Trump blaming them after a spate of mass shootings in 2019, or reports that Marjory Stoneman Douglass shooter Nikolas Cruz was “allowed to play” violent video games), there is insufficient evidence to prove this phenomenon. As research psychologist Rachel Kowert told Kotaku in 2023, “Violent video game research is really interesting because people really just desperately want to hold on to an easy solution to all of the world’s complex problems like mass shootings, juvenile delinquency — they just want to blame something.”
Attempts to connect video games to real-world violence have been taking place since the medium’s inception, and many people (not just gamers) believe it’s time to start looking at other motivations. Mangione’s arrest is just the most recent reminder of a decades-long struggle to pinpoint what’s plaguing American youth.
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