Pretty sus.
If you’ve been online for more than a picosecond recently, you might be aware that a high-profile killing of a healthcare insurance company CEO has been in the news cycle. You might also be aware that the current suspect in the case, a man by the name of Luigi Mangione (who has now been charged with murder) was reportedly a bit of a gamer.
Despite other reports surfacing that Mangione was suffering from debilitating pain after back surgery, that last bit appears to have captured the attention of the voracious appetites of the non-gaming media—including one bizarrely-headlined report by NBC.
The story has gone somewhat viral for the following paragraph: “Luigi Mangione, who was arrested and charged with murder in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins, a member of the group told NBC News.”
The whiplash arrives immediately after, as it reads “in the game, called ‘Among Us'”, which might be the most incredible start to a second paragraph I’ve ever seen. The information comes courtesy of Alejandro Romero, who attended Mangione’s university, and stated to the website: “I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us.”
It is neither my job, nor my desire, to psychoanalyse a murder suspect or to joke about his gaming habits, which I’d be willing to bet are an order of magnitude less relevant than his back surgery. While funny in a vacuum, I also don’t think Romero’s at any fault here for trying to wrap his head around a guy he’d played videogames with hitting national headlines. I will, however, merrily tear into the most absurd attempt I’ve ever seen to try and side-eye videogames for a criminal motive.
While the article does then go on to give an accurate description of Among Us as the thing that it is—a harmless social deduction game—to even gesture vaguely in its direction as a potential motive is so ghoulish it lances right into the kind of parody you’d expect to see out of a satire site like Hard Drive.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Among Us, somehow, it’s a videogame where you play as funny little astronauts tasked with keeping a spaceship afloat while, unbeknownst to you, several of whom are traitors. It’s cartoonish enough that the ESRB rated it E10+, as in, suitable for 10 year olds.
The developers of Among Us are taking it in a comedic stride, though. On Bluesky, the Among Us account responded with an appropriately-confused, lowercase, unpunctuated “um”. Meanwhile, the developer account for Innersloth, calmly and civilly noted: “interesting times we live in.”
As a capstone on this nonsense, Forest Willard, co-founder of the studio, also wrote: “As a CEO who made Among Us,” and nothing else. An appropriately ‘fill in the blank’ joke, because I don’t think anything’s more absurd than Among Us, a game 10 year olds can play, being cited as an “assassin game” in regards to a very real murder, allegedly motivated by very serious, real-world issues. What else is there to say, other than ‘um’?
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