Designers make countless decisions when crafting the holistic experience of their game. Some are cascading, like whether the player will mainly be defeating monsters or drawing paintings. Others are small, like looting an elven sword from a dwarven temple, where that small detail can imply much more depth even though it’s inconsequential to the rest of the game. These tiny details will often be tipped an “Oh, that’s cool,” thought and then forgotten, each not robust enough on its own to develop the discussion in a whole talk or thesis.
Yet I’d still like to expand on and signal boost these tiny details to others, to celebrate the impact that designer’s decision had on the experience. Inspired by José P. Zagal's book of Game Design Snacks, I write about these observations in reports of 500 words or less and build an archive here. Even the smallest of details can spark deeper thought and discussion.
Among Us is a video game inspired by party games like Mafia and One Night Werewolf. Each player is assigned a role that determines their agency and social relationships with other players. These can range from Engineer that protects the crew by repairing vital systems on the ship to hidden killers that must pick off the Crewmates before being identified. Like Mafia, the base game assigns two standard roles—innocent Crewmate and secret Imposter, but the player community have developed mods of many additional roles with new behaviors to expand on these relationships. One of these custom roles, the Vulture, stumbles on a perfect example of mechanics producing emergent narrative.
The Vulture is a Neutral alignment role, meaning that player can win independently of the Crew or Imposter teams by meeting a specific condition. If the Vulture finds a body of a fallen Crewmate before it’s been reported, they can interact to “eat” the body, which removes it from the board for other players to find and adds one to their total of bodies eaten. If the Vulture eats a specified number of bodies, the game ends and they claim victory.
The Vulture player learns through experience that it is most advantageous for them to discern the Imposters for themselves but keep those identities secret from other players. By sticking close to the Imposters, they can eat a body soon after its fallen and mitigate risk of it being found and reported by a Crewmate. Follow an Imposter around the map, wait for them to kill, and eat the body immediately.
Emergent narrative is when complex actions in video game mechanics develop stories through a player’s interactions with the system. The Vulture role is aptly named for its body-eating ability, but whether a conscious design decision or not, this metaphor for the role is layered. Vultures—the real life bird—are scavengers, feeding off the corpses of other animals. They are specifically known for their patience. Vultures will circle injured animals or observe attacks from predators to wait and feed on the leftovers. The Vulture player in Among Us will eventually exhibit this behavior, hanging around danger because it is most advantageous for them to be there at the point of death.
This is not defined by the role—nothing in the role’s agency constrains them to stick near the Imposters, but instead a strategy the player discovers through play. The role’s mechanics and the metaphor for the role are simply perfectly paired to tell the story of vulture behavior. The tactical way to win as the Vulture role is to act as the birds do, resulting in a beautiful example of emergent narrative.