How Roleplaying Games Help My Kids Through Covid

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Minecraft made sense last spring, in the midst of exile from our Beijing home, while we stayed in temporary housing with no end in sight. Our family found ourselves stuck in a life we’d left, now living out of suitcases, and it made sense that building a world brought peace. Even the blocky nature of Minecraft helped remove the worlds we built from the turbulence and uncertainty outside. It supplemented our LEGO brick builds beautifully, those times when our phones were face down we could just escape and build a place where we’d like to spend our time.

The video gaming cut down once we could return and have in-person playdates again, but they occasionally serve that very same purpose: to block out the stresses of life and only concern yourself with those friends allowed to play on your server.

Then came the new game Among Us. You are an alien, sharing some kind of ship with 4-10 other aliens, and 1-2 of you are told in private that you are: The Impostor! Everyone else (called Crewmates) gets tasks to perform aboard the ship, but The Impostor’s job is to sneak around the ship and kill all the Crewmates before they can perform their tasks. If a Crewmate suspects or sees The Impostor in the act, they can call an emergency meeting and vote them out to win!

Now, we’re very careful as parents not to glorify killing. When we slowly ventured into Roblox so our kids could stay in touch with their friends around the world, the second rule was “no killing games.” But after a number of their favorite YouTube gamers kept coming back with Among Us videos, and the more we watched it, we decided it was not the kind of violence that was bad or complicated enough to be introduced to their still developing minds. Plus, you need at least four people to play a private game, and we could play as a family.

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It turns out that it’s a very fun game! Part of the fun is that you have to be sneaky, but it’s also satisfying to just be a Crewmate and complete your tasks. The kids also created a version of it “in real life” where we have tasks around the house to finish while we try to outrun The Impostor.

I find being a Crewmate to be very zen.

The killing part is so cartoony that it’s less violent than Looney Tunes or some Transformers cartoons. And as we play it more and more, and get into the sub cultures of fan-made music videos that become earworms, I see the appeal for anyone who’s been through the year 2020 and feeling reminiscent as we enter 2021. Just like zombies, Halloween, and scary movies — Among Us lets us run away from death, still try to do mundane tasks while it chases us, and sometimes even be the one in control of it (if we are The Impostor).

Yeah. I get why my kids would dig this game after last year.

I remember when my oldest had separation anxiety for the first time in his life, and a counselor told me that we need to not avoid it. We need to face it head on so he can understand how to embrace and handle his fears. Falling down in a dramatic death scene while waiting for someone to find your dead body might not lie in the “peaceful parenting” category, but it sure is satisfying when you spend your days masked, disinfecting surfaces, and your hands feel immune to sanitizer.

Taking control of death and danger in entertaining ways can be wonderful ways to work through some anxiety and stress around it. Young as they are, they know the action of “killing” someone in Among Us is play acting, and the deaths of our little aliens are nothing close to what we mean when we bring out our book about death, or discuss real life consequences. But it’s nice to pretend you have more control over it than you really do, and “game over” means you can try again next time.

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Photos: Cindy Marie Jenkins

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