Game Theory: Among Us, The 300 IQ Impostor Strategy That Wins EVERY TIME

[Music] hmm [Music] hello internet welcome to game theory the show that spent years trying to convince you that your favorite video game characters are all evil imposters and today i'm taking it to its logical conclusion by convincing you that all your loved ones are also evil imposters that's right today we're covering among us a five dollar indie game from 2018 that over the past few weeks has blown up in a huge way seriously as i'm writing this on the first week of september it is the second most watched game on twitch bigger than fortnite bigger than fall guys and only just behind league of legends which gotta say good on you league for staying so strong for so very long among us is a social deduction game where your goal is to root out the killers hidden in your group basically it's like werewolf or mafia except it's 10 times cooler since now you're in a space the game takes place over a series of rounds where you wander around a science station as either a crew member trying to complete science tasks or as an imposter who's secretly trying to sabotage the station and kill the crew you alternate between game play and meetings which can be called whenever someone finds a dead body the meetings are the real heart and soul of the game since those are the times when everyone hops on a voice chat to try and figure out who the impostors are before holding a vote to pick someone to throw out into the airlock or throw into the lava or just push to their death the crew wins if they manage to kill all the imposters or complete all the tasks on the station and the impostors win if they manage to kill enough crew members that the imposters outnumber them long story short it's a game all about deception murder and twist reveals which means it lends itself to some pretty incredible online video reactions disguised toast he's probably my current favorite we vote first [Music] but today isn't about over-the-top reactions or secret lore or how this game further fuels our distrust of fellow human beings no i've played this game a lot a lot a lot i mean you've all just adopted among us but i was born in it molded by games like it and being the overly competitive nerd that i am i've kept track of my win-loss records in this style of social deduction game it's at 87 not perfect by any means but with me on the winning side far more often than chance and while playing among us it stayed around the same rate there are obviously some more complications in this game than the usual mafia or werewolf scenario but at the end of the day regardless of what side i'm playing on i have a pretty proven winning strategy that i've worked on for years and one that continues to function really well and among us all these other jelly beans online dealing with strategies in the 200 to 400 iq range if you're playing like a theorist we're talking about strats in the thousand iq range so today i'm teaching you the perfect strategy for among us how to win regardless of what side you're on and it all boils down to one thing game theory that's right the namesake of this show so are you ready to start winning like a theorist then let's begin so game theory it isn't just the name of a really awesome online show that you should totally be subscribed to the phrase actually originates as the study of constructing mathematical models to analyze strategic interactions among people trying to make rational decisions that is a really boring definition for what's otherwise a really cool concept it's basically the gameplay of among us when you're in a situation where people are gonna lie and manipulate information for their own gain game theory is there to help you figure out what to do and the first thing i got to tell you to do my friends in this game theory about game theory is kill people yeah i know it sounds harsh but let's face it this channel is at its best when people are dying by the boatload but the same holds true for your win-loss stats and among us because there will always be more crew members than imposters any economist should be able to tell you the basic consequences of that imposters being more scarce need to treat their lives as more valuable than those of the crew members who are more abundant if you're in a 10 player game and a crew member dies the crew has only lost 12.5 percent of their team but if an imposter dies suddenly they've lost 50 percent of their team might seem like an obvious fact but it actually comes with several consequences for how you should be playing the game strategically for one thing it means that crew members should be looking for opportunities when they can trade their lives for imposter lives and it means that imposters should be trying to avoid getting themselves into these kinds of situations now written that way it's a bit confusing but it becomes a lot more clear in an example let's say that it's early in the game and a crew member say i don't know alpharad has stumbled onto another crew member disguised toast who's standing over a dead body disguised toast is one of our imposters and while alpharad doesn't know it for certain it's pretty easy for him to put two and two together one dead body plus one suspicious individual equals a probable imposter so alpha calls for a team meeting and says toast just killed someone i saw him standing over the body now one possible response for toast is to counter accuse alpharad after all both he and alpha were near the body he might come up with his own version of the same story claiming wait a minute alpharad was the one who killed the crew member and i was the one who stumbled onto him i mean this is a conversation that happens in literally every round of every game of werewolf mafia among us ever right but here's the thing it is absolutely the wrong move to make in this sort of scenario while it might be tempting for toast to do this once alfred and disguise toast accuse each other the crew knows that one of them is definitely the killer even if toast survives that round from this point forward he's a marked man at that point the logical thing for the crew to do is just throw em both out of the airlock true they might be killing an innocent but given how abundant and expendable crew members are it's a sacrifice that will in the long run preserve more lives and ultimately lead to a higher chance of winning the game what toast should do in this situation and what your optimal play is is to not counter accuse instead he should try to come up with a lie that doesn't cast blame on alpharad saying something like i stumbled onto the dead body and was investigating the crime scene to see if the killer was nearby granted people might not believe that story in fact they probably won't but it's your single best chance of surviving the next rounds of voting and that's the key takeaway here if you're an imposter avoid putting yourself in situations that allow crew members to sacrifice one of their own in order to get rid of you on the other side of things if you're a normal crew member your main goal in the game is to not look suspicious you probably were doing that already but it's important to realize why most people want to avoid looking suspicious because it results in them dying by getting thrown out of an airlock but as we've already established your life is meaningless in the game it's a pretty important clause to have added there your life in the game is meaningless slap that one on a demotivational poster no the real reason to avoid looking suspicious is that it distracts your team from identifying the real killer if they spend the round throwing you out of the airlock obviously it sucks that you died but the real loss here is that they wasted a round that they could have used to potentially identify the real killer this is the reason why you should always travel in groups not so much for safety but rather for information because if one of you dies the other will be left alive to give a report on how it happened adding one more wrinkle to this formula if you're in a game with two impostors you have to worry about the possibility of a double murder where two imposters team up to kill two crew members which means that contrary to what you might be thinking traveling in groups of three can actually be better than traveling in a group of four this also applies to the team meetings it can be easy to want to skip to the part where you try to accuse the person that you think's the killer but that more often than not just winds up being a big argument where everyone's tossing out accusations rather than starting things off with a question of who seems guilty start instead with the easier and more evidence-based question of who seems innocent determine first where the body was found and who wasn't close enough to have killed him then figure out which crew members can verify each other's alibis focus on the facts before you move into speculation give each person a chance to say where they were and give them a chance to say anything that could vouch for another crew member's innocence once you have a better idea of which crew members seem the most likely to be innocent you're in a much better position to root out the real killer because at that point you'll know which accusations are coming from people who are actually credible and which crew members are just trying to spread misinformation and if you're an imposter well you should be trying to do the exact opposite of all of that but not in the ways that you might initially think when people think about deception in games like this they usually think about it in obvious ways like when you accuse an innocent person of being the killer but those kind of lies and misinformation are often the most blatant and easiest to catch it immediately puts a target on your back while a false accusation can have short-term benefits it's often better to focus on the smaller more subtle ways that you can steer the conversation away from discovering who the real killer is i.e you if someone starts rambling don't interrupt them let them ramble eat up the time that could have been spent more productively then you have room to accuse them by claiming that their rambling might have just been a tactic to waste valuable meeting time try and find subtle ways to goad the crew members into wasting time ask them questions that seem like legitimate questions but don't actually reveal any sort of useful information it makes it look like you're contributing to the team when in actuality you're just burning time and adding lots of useless information onto the pile if the meeting ends with everyone confused and just voting more or less randomly well that is usually the ideal outcome for the imposter but what about all that time spent outside of team meetings we already talked about how groups of three are ideal for the normal crewmates but what should you be doing as the imposter since let's face it it's the best part of the game well first off try to give yourself an alibi one of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by killing someone in a place where their body won't be discovered for a while after the kill go hang out with some other crew members preferably a group that's not near the body and don't kill anyone else or wander away when the body finally does get discovered you'll have a group of people who can report that they spend a bunch of time watching you not killing and they'll be able to vouch for your innocence alternatively if you can't find an isolated individual to kill instead try to kill in a place that has a lot of people in it but obviously not close enough to see it do the deed if there's a bunch of people who could all plausibly have committed the murder then most people will be reluctant to vote since there's a high probability that they'd be voting for someone who's innocent lastly team up with your impostor mates they are your built-in alibis as people are breaking off to do chores in the station go with your impostor mate and then on the way break apart and each do a kill as long as you always show up to the group together no one will ever be the wiser vouch for each other as long as you're able to and you'll go far the final wrinkle in among us that other games like mafia and werewolf don't have is the sabotage mechanic which creates a temporary problem that the crew either has to go out and fix or just wait out the sabotage function has a cooldown so there's this real question of what the best way to sabotage the station is should you sabotage the life support system and try to suffocate everyone for an early game over should you sabotage the doors to make it harder for the crew to get around the station and complete their tasks should you disable the security system now this is probably going to be the most subjective part of this video because it's based on my experience playing with the game's different mechanics and not actual game theory but i'm firmly of the belief that the best way to use your limited sabotage opportunities as an imposter is leaving everyone in the dark literally it all comes back to the thing that we've been talking about for this entire episode information and specifically the limiting of information when the lights are off crew members have a limited vision cone while the imposter meanwhile isn't affected that gives you a huge informational advantage you can see crew members coming before they can see you which makes it all the easier to plan your escape and get away with murder that might seem like it's stating the obvious duh of course killing the lights makes it harder for the crew members to see you committing murder however the underrated aspect of it is that sabotaging the lights also makes it harder for the crew members to see each other this means that not only is it easier for you to escape from the crime scene undetected but it's harder for the crew members to give each other alibis not only are you placing less suspicion on yourself but you're placing more suspicion on all the rest of the crew remember social deduction games are all about deception i know that's something that a lot of people just intuitively grasp but it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that deception just means you're good at lying the thing is there is way more to deception than just being able to say i'm not the killer with a straight face it's about controlling the flow of information both by spreading misinformation as well as by limiting the crew's ability to access the real truthful information hopefully operating this way will help you if you're an imposter and it'll help you know what to guard against if you happen to be a crew member but more importantly than anything in a stupid game hopefully these are the sorts of lessons you keep in mind out in the real world because there's always going to be someone out there trying to sell you on something that they're not but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: undefined

Views: 8,739,522

Rating: 4.9046822 out of 5

Keywords: among us, among us game, among us all kill animation, among us kill animations, toast among us, among us strategy, among us tips and tricks, among us gameplay, among us animation, among us funny moments, among us trailer, imposter among us, imposter strategy, among us memes, game theorists, game theory, matpat

Id: Ck604TT4hEg

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Bruh-man1300]

Pretty good

[u/shadow0wolf0]

Overall pretty intermediate strategies, kinda disappointed.

[u/shadow0wolf0]

Plussys represent.

[u/Ausmaster1001]

Hey, a shout out to my man Toast from my man MatPat. Nice

[u/Koyotemoone]

The fact that public lobbies only have 60 or 30 second meetings doesn’t give times for intelligent discussion. I can easy turn the crew on each other

[u/kayley290]

I Put This Vid On The Among Us SubReddit

[u/Handington]

Loved that intro. MatPat and crew are such good sports about it. Those folks are great!

[u/dotherighthings]

I just want a partner, someone to pull hi-jinks while ultimately making the game more enjoyable for the randoms. I'm acquiring a desire to conspire.

[u/spongyruler]

Based on the ending of the video, it seems like MatPat might be trying to do another ARG thing... That just me?