Front Burner - Politicians are Among Us

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

Last weekend NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised over $200,000 US for charity by livestreaming a game called Among Us on the streaming platform Twitch for nearly six hours. Among Us is a popular space-murder-mystery multiplayer online game. About 100,000 people watched the livestream. Today, CBC senior writer and gaming columnist Jonathan Ore is here to fill us in on Among Us and Twitch and to explain how left-wing politicians are taking full advantage of these digital spaces. But can this tactic work for others?

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Well, there's two people that are dead, right? Sorry, was it a double kill? John, where did you just come from there? Did you see one body or two bodies? I think I know what you're thinking.

No, this is not the latest hit true crime podcast, but it is just as addictive. I'm so mind game. For Haku and Heart Accused, I'm 100% comfortable with you. I don't think it's Leslie. I'm nearly positive it's Dose. And why is that?

God, is it Dose? Among Us is a wildly popular multiplayer online game that involves a lot of murder. I can't kill Pokey. She's so nice. Okay, I think I have to do it. Sorry, Pokey. Oh no! That's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making a kill. This weekend, the U.S. Congresswoman raised over $200,000 for charity by playing Among Us live on the streaming site Twitch for nearly six hours. And with the help of Canada's NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh. The violence. Why is this happening? I thought we were just going to have a peaceful game, you know, just hang out. Poor myth. About 100,000 people tuned in to watch her live stream. 30,000 people tuned in to Jagmeet Singh's. Today, CBC senior writer and gaming columnist Jonathan Orr is here

to fill us in on Among Us and Twitch and explain how left-wing politicians are taking full advantage of these digital spaces and why it won't work for everyone. I'm Jamie Poisson, and this is FrontBurner. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Jamie. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm really, really looking forward to this discussion today. This is something I don't know a lot about, but it is super interesting. And I know that we're going to get to politics in a moment. But for the uninitiated like me, how would you describe the game Among Us? And maybe we could start with where the game is set.

Mm hmm. So Among Us is set on a space station or a moon base or another sci-fi setting. The whole point of the game is that you have a group of players who take the role of these tiny, colorful astronauts. They're like these little cartoon characters. They look like something, like a mix between Lego figures and Teletubbies,

if that's still a relevant reference. I also had written down a walking Tamagotchi. I don't know if that works either. So the whole idea is that there is a team of crewmates on the station, and they're all trying to kind of repair the station to make sure everything's going all right. Unfortunately, there is someone on the team, one or two people. They're called the Impostor. They're kind of like the mole, like the team one or two people they're called the imposter they're kind of like the mole like the secret murderer or the villain um think of it like there are other games that have been played in the past like something called mafia or werewolf where basically

everyone's trying to find like the mole i was just thinking of mafia i was just thinking of mafia yeah yeah it has been compared to uh mafia as well as other board games and video games that follow that format. It's very much, you know, there's a mole and we have to figure out who the mole is and the mole has to do everything they can to divert attention and, you know, probably lie incessantly

to throw away suspicion upon them. And this game does allow self-reporting, doesn't it? It does. I know I sound so suspicious right now. So yeah, they go around finishing tasks, like you go around this tiny map, you know, like in the engines into the medbay, the navigation

of a starship, fulfilling these small tasks. They're really easy for anyone who hasn't played games a lot to do. So you would have to click on the different wires or cut wires to connect them. Vent out some leaves from the exhaust area. Shoot some asteroids that are in front of the ship, stuff like that. In the meantime, the imposter who, you know, nobody knows who the imposter is other than them,

they're going around doing more or less the same thing, but they're actually there to kill other members of the crew. So it's a lot of subterfuge and like role-playing where the imposter is trying to find the right place to kill a crew member and not get caught and pretend to be doing the same things that the other crewmates are doing. Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the terminology that I keep hearing around among us? So like our executive producer, he sent this picture this morning of his son who had made this sign and he was just wearing this sign that said sus. And I keep hearing sort of words like this. You mentioned venting, sus, elect.

A lot of it comes out of the fact that if you are not playing over voice chat with a group of friends, like if you're playing a game with random players most of the interaction takes place in the text chat so like any other short form like sus means suspicious if somebody finds a dead body they report it and then everybody is called into an emergency meeting and everybody has to talk about like well what did you see where did you find the body where did you see this other person and if someone's story doesn't add up to what other people's stories were they might say like sus so like the green player's story doesn't add up to what other people's stories were they might say like sus so like the green player's story is sus so in chat they just say green sus reggie reggie was a little sus because he was doing the same thing as me yeah i was following you because

i thought you wanted to kill me and i was like what's going on here elect stands for one of the rooms in most of the maps called electrical it's It's just where you have to fix the wires and stuff like that. In the main map, the electrical room has a lot of weird corridors and corners. And if the lights are off, that means your line of sight is limited. So it's actually one of the riskiest places to go into because the murderer might be hiding around the corner. So that's kind of why electricity, or as they say, elec is often mentioned. Gotcha. It's really just like how any other online chat develops, to be honest.

Gotcha, gotcha. So we've got these crew members and they're working on these tasks and they're trying their best not to get killed. And then we've got these imposters and they're going around murdering people. And then every time a body is found, you get into one of these emergency meetings. And everybody tries to figure out who the imposter is, right, who the murderer is. And tell me a little bit more about these emergency meetings, because it seems like this is where things can get really interesting, right? Yeah, I mean, at its core, Among Us is a game about social interaction and social deception.

So yeah, whenever someone reports the body, everyone is kind of retracing their steps that happened up until the time the body was reported. Where was the body? I don't know. I just saw it. How did you get there? Which direction? Right or left? Wait, this is very suspicious it's all just about like you know everyone tells their story and people need to corroborate like oh i saw the green player here like 10 seconds ago and then i saw a body so that 10 seconds

are unaccounted for so then the green player has to say well i was here and then everyone else has to basically compare to say like oh that sort of makes sense or that doesn't and if you're the imposter probably you are trying to weave a tale of subterfuge that sounds plausible that does not point the finger at you as to you know being in the room with the body i watched you stare at a body in the reactor you were standing right there next to the body. I was doing my task and you came out of a grave and killed Jan. It's also interesting because the imposter has a bunch of other things they can do. Like, so there are vents in the rooms.

And if you're the imposter, because I believe according to the storyline, the imposter is an alien, they can kind of like shwarp into the vents and then like transport it around the map. What? Yeah, so clearly if you are the imposter and you're trying to tell the people and convince the others that you're not the imposter, you're not going to say, well, I vented, so I went from this vent

to the other side of the map because only the imposter can do that. Got it. it yeah this is another term i keep hearing vented okay so you've convinced me like this sounds very fun i would really like to play this but but like why do you think that this sort of clue on steroids, mafia-like game has taken off as much as it has right now? Yeah, it's actually really interesting because this game has kind of become the game of 2020. But it launched originally in 2018 from this small independent team called Interslof. And honestly, when it launched in 2018, it kind of tanked.

It had a very small community who liked it, but it just didn't grab the attention of gamers en masse. But it hit its peak in 2020 when a couple of very popular twist streamers, so people who play video games live on the internet, they played... This stupid game called Among Us. Don't call it a stupid game. It's great. Now, how do you play it? What do you do?

And the social nature of the game is really good for broadcasting. It is a very performative game. When you're playing by yourself, suddenly there's this flash on the screen that this other player killed you. And there's this really great, oh, my God, what's going to happen? kill view there's this really great oh my god what's gonna happen and then if you're following the stream of the guy who is the imposter you can kind of hear them depend on their microphone settings like they're muttering to themselves oh my god how do i like lie right now to get out of this hassan is looking up hassan's totally gonna book me hassan's totally gonna book me right here um so it's a very fun like it's you know it kind of has some dna of like your reality competition

shows i suppose yeah yeah and you mentioned twitch i just um for people who might not know a lot about It kind of has some DNA of your reality competition shows, I suppose. Yeah, and you mentioned Twitch. For people who might not know a lot about Twitch, this video game streaming site, people just watch these players. It's like they watch people play video games like a TV show, basically. I guess this explanation explains to me why this is a good game for politicians to play as a political tool. But also Twitch is being used as a political tool lately. And all of this brings us to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I'm running around cams with Pokey, with AOC. We chill and we're having a great time.

Pokey and AOC going to cams. AOC creeps up behind Pokei, slits her throat. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And how has she used the game and by extension Twitch lately? Ocasio-Cortez or AOC as she is known quite widely on the internet now. She first went on Twitch near the tail end of the US.s election along with her fellow representative ilan omar and a few other very popular streamers on twitch they were all in the same game of among us it's ilhan and me oh my god it's gonna be amateur hour up in here okay um they played for several hours and i believe um she got one one of the highest number of viewers watching her stream at the same time.

It was like over 400,000 people were watching her channel at once, which is pretty amazing. I believe, according to one report, the only other stream that exceeded that was actually Tyler Blevins, a.k.a. Ninja, streaming with our fellow Canadian Drake. Tyler Blevins, a.k.a. Ninja, streaming with our fellow Canadian Drake. We stay in the studio for so long, like sometimes like 20 hours. It's just nice to take up a little mental break. We all just squat up and we suck. But yeah, like she was there more or less to outreach to voters, to young voters especially, to encourage people to vote and to donate to their local campaigns and things of that sort. Honestly, it's very bread and butter political outreach.

It's just that she was doing it with a different audience. And it was super, it was super successful. Right. And I want to get to that audience in a second. But she also played over the weekend with our very own Canadian politician, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Are you trying to call me out? By the way, maybe. Solidarity.

The NRC looks clear here and and can you tell me a little bit about how that game went down yeah they also played for several hours oh man yeah i was surprised i was actually really impressed um and i don't normally talk about being impressed with a politician it feels kind of weird yeah so as far as we know it started with uh this canadian streamer he goes by the name northern lion he tweeted at uh jagmeet singh like around october to say hey you want to play among us with us and he was like yeah sure man and then last week jagmeet singh tweeted like oh yeah we're in we're gonna do this and then he tweeted uh or casio cortez like you want to join us and you know she's she's definitely game she's done before it before. And so she said, yeah.

And then that kind of started to get the ball rolling as far as we know. I mean, I imagine his people reached out to her people before. Because if Jagmeet Singh tweeted to AOC publicly about this and then heard nothing, that would have been hilarious in a very different way.

Tell me about the game. Any standout moments from the live stream a lot um for one you can tell that singh wasn't extremely familiar with the game at first maybe a little bit stiff in the first hour or so like he was still more or less in his like political talk and campaigning mode what are you doing to stay connected what are you doing to stay connected and how important is it for you to connect in these like difficult times if you think that uh if you think that people i just i just totally just killed somebody it's so crazy this game it was actually quite funny because when you watch someone play a game on twitch usually you see the screen of their game but you also in one corner see like themselves like their camera like

their google chat or their zoom media space um and his background was just, you know, another backdrop with like the NDP symbols on it. It was kind of weird. Like it looked as though he was just doing an interview with Power and Politics, to be honest. Right, right. Mostly people are like in their bedrooms or something. Yeah, like usually they're in like some kind of well-lit room with their gamer chair and like their anime figures

in the background shelf. So it's certainly not the kind of thing going on there. So there were a lot of really good moments. funny thing was that like singh was randomly chosen to be the imposter of something like four out of the five first games jack is all around the place he's going wild i'm not gonna lie i just like running around i just enjoy the running around so he had been forced to play the villain and try to talk his way out of not being pegged for murdering people in the game like multiple times. We got to the point where like, Jukmeet can't be the imposter again, can he? He's so good. He's so good at this.

If you keep clapping everybody over and over again, they're going to write about this. Like Jukmeet is too convincing as a murderer on a spaceship. And what kind of political messages were they able to weave in there, AOC and Singh? It was very much talking about their parties, like left-leaning progressive politics. There was as well talk about the pandemic response. AOC was talking about how she's only like a day's drive away from Canada, but the pandemic response and the approach to universal health care is just so starkly different across the border. When we propose similar policies in the United States, people are saying this is impossible. This is candy land. This is not,

you know, viable. And you can literally drive one day. It's just a stone's throw away from being able to afford your insulin. She mentioned the CERB specifically. She was kind of like, you guys gave $2,000 a month to people who applied to this? And, you know, Jagmeet Singh was like, yeah, definitely. And, you know, I wouldn't say he, quote unquote, took credit for it, but in a way he was kind of like an ambassador for the wider Canadian approach to these kinds of things going on.

We have a lot of people who might be conservative, but still get that like science is important to follow public health advice. Like it's encouraging sometimes. And you mentioned before, like the big numbers AOC got. The first time she played with Representative Ilhan Omar, they got big numbers here too, right? 100,000 on her stream, 30,000 on SingStream, which is a lot, right? Like that's more than, you know, maybe the average like political rally that someone would hold.

What are they trying to do here politically? Like using Twitch as this political outreach tool? What do you think they're trying to accomplish? It's fascinating because I'd be so curious to know how this came up in like a political staffers meeting. Like did someone intern or did someone say like, hey, you should play video games on Twitch? And someone was like, what? What the heck is Twitch? I would say it's actually not that complicated. You want to reach out to new and young voters.

You want to reach out to audiences that maybe normally don't know who you are or haven't been following the politics beat and the best way to do it is to kind of jump in there and do what the other people are doing so like you know if you want to talk to us you're going to play our game and then to their credit um singh and cortez were like yeah sure let's let's do it does anyone else feel really wholesome right now yeah after i after I've been in that posture like six hours ago, I've been killing everybody. That's the nicest thing a murderer has ever said. . Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. It also strikes me, you know, that there's something about the platform that lets people build like real relationships with people. And, you know, maybe that could be very effective too, as a political tool, though, I imagine that only for certain kinds of politicians, right? Like it, it might not work for all politicians. Do you think that's, that's a fair observation? Yeah, it was funny. I think some of the people in the chat, which I suppose is a whole nother discussion, they were talking to AOC, like, hey, get, hey, get Bernie Sanders to play Among Us.

And so before he has a Twitch account, they had played a pre-recorded campaign event. But there was some criticism there because for one thing, he wasn't playing a video game and the event wasn't live. There is a sense among the wider Twitch community that this is not just a place for you to broadcast your promotional videos. If you are on Twitch, which is a gaming platform, it should probably be your gaming. The Twitch community too is like steeped in memes and like irony. And, you know, there's a certain kind of language basically that you have to be able to speak.

Is Kappa a legit thing? Do people actually say Kappa? In the normal world, people say Kappa. So if you're at some political debate and your opponent says something that you know isn't true, you say, that's Kappa. Say, boy, that's Kappa. Okay, don't do that.

Mitch McConnell, sir, that's Kappa. You can't just swoop in the same way that political leaders will have a photo op at a Tim Hortons and say, oh, I really love sour cream donuts and then leave. So I think AOC in particular was very well attuned to that. And her approach has seemed authentic in a way that many others trying to take advantage of the gaming audience and like the live streaming audience maybe might've missed. For the record, I was in NAV,

I went down to Shields and I saw meat going down while I was walking back up towards NAV when it was called. Right, and just give me some examples of that, of maybe some others who have missed this opportunity. There was one rather infamous play earlier in the year

where the US Army was starting to stream games of Call of Duty on Twitch. And, you know, they had a guy who was, you know, he was a representative of the U.S. Army. He positioned himself like, oh, yeah, we're just here to play games and have fun. Every post that I do from now on is going to say UU in it, just to flex. But it was it was sussed out, I suppose, as primarily a recruiting tool for the army. And Twitch chats, the users commenting in this real-time flood of comments, they were not having any of it. The streamer was asking, you know, like,

ask us anything about, you know, being in the army or, you know, playing video games with the army. And instead they were kind of flooded with a whole bunch of people asking, like, well, Twitch streamer, what's your favorite United States war crime? Oh, cool. Nice. Really chill guy. Have a nice time getting banned, my dude. And then, you know, banning people for speech on the internet is certainly a hot topic. And they were very upset about it. That's so interesting. You know, so it's I mean, that definitely backfired. What do you think the lessons are that politicians should take from all of this? There's nothing more vulgar than a tourist, someone with a purely transactional interest in a scene. So if we were to bring it back to Among Us, it's kind of like if an imposter in the gaming scene is actually one of the most frowned upon things.

You don't want to come in here and pretend, oh, I love video games, and then not actually show that you know what you're talking about. That is maybe the death knell of trying to engage in the gaming and streaming audience. And then, you know, especially on Twitch or YouTube streaming, because you were going to get that response immediately. Like this could also be taken as gatekeeping. You know, that's kind of ridiculous. But I think if you're demonstrating you have a willingness to learn about the game and the community that you're talking to, then communities will be receptive, which is, you know, like a wider political message like that,

I think applies outside of gaming. Surely, like you don't want to talk down to an audience or a demographic without knowing what their issues are and what the concerns really are, you know? Jonathan, thank you so much. This was a really fascinating conversation. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun. Okay. I'm going to go, I I'm gonna go play Among Us. This weekend. I you've you've really sold me on it. Some other news before we say goodbye today. A Canadian actor known for an Oscar-nominated role in Juno and starring in Christopher Nolan's time-bending film Inception came out as transgender on Tuesday.

Leighette Page, as he'd now like to be called, made the announcement on social media, explaining that he goes by the he, they pronouns, and saying how lucky he felt to have arrived at this place and for all the people who have supported him. In his post, Page also spoke about the violence facing many trans people, specifically trans women of color. Hailing from Nova Scotia, Page has been an outspoken environmental and LGBTQ activist. And for fans wondering, the actor will continue to star in The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. That's all for today. I'm J.B. Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.