After nearly 70 students attended the first virtual Among Us game night hosted by the Student Union Building in October, administrators decided to hold a second virtual event on Friday, Nov. 13. Even though only about 20 people joined the second game night, the event kept the same positive energy from the first one.
Among Us is an online multiplayer game set in a spaceship where players complete tasks while one or two secret “imposter(s)” attempt to kill all the other players without getting caught. Players can guess who the imposter is throughout the game and vote out the crewmate they believe is acting the most suspicious until they find the imposter or run out of time.
The game was released in the summer of 2018 but started getting more popular during the COVID-19 pandemic when students started using it as a way to virtually socialize with friends.
Sophomore Sarah Biesterveld said events like this are great coping mechanisms because they help distract students from stressful problems they are dealing with and allow them to focus on something fun and social.
SUB events coordinator Anders Flagstad said that with such a good turnout at the first game night, they wanted to give that experience to students again. The first game night featured prizes like gift cards, headphones and Lobo merchandise, but the second game night only had gift card raffles after the SUB closed due to public health restrictions aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus.
The second game night had planned on handing out gift packages containing items like pizza socks and sunglasses for everyone that attended, but Flagstad said those will be saved until next semester when it is safer to hand them out. Flagstad said the students who won gift cards would be emailed the access codes so they don’t have to pick it up in person.
SUB events like the Among Us game night are funded by the Student Fee Review Board to pay for prizes, according to Flagstad.
“I think it’s really cool that we get to give back to students and they can come to our events and have a fun time and see their money given back to them,” Flagstad said.
Biesterveld, a sophomore studying film history and criticism, won the headphones at the first game night. She said she had already been playing Among Us for over two months and was excited to attend both game nights.
“I actually did like the smaller one rather than the big group,” Biesterveld said. “We actually got to stay with the same group and not have to waste time by going into a completely different group.”
The participants were separated into two breakout rooms to make game servers less crowded. There were some students who showed up late without knowing how to play the game, with some leaving halfway through. Only students that stayed until the end were eligible for the raffle prize drawing.
Flagstad said they showed everyone a tutorial video at the start of the first game night but didn’t show it on the second night because most of the students said they had played before in a survey at the beginning of the Zoom meeting.
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Uni Nights will be hosting a trivia game night tonight on Friday, Nov. 20 at 6 p.m. The last event of the semester, it will replace the Late Night Breakfast normally held at the end of each semester. There will be more gift card prizes, and the Zoom link can be found on the UNM SUB Instagram.
Daniel Ward is a senior reporter at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @wordsofward34
