Gaming Memes Are the Last Escape From 2020

The memes of 2020 haven't been the most uplifting. Many who rely on them as an escape from reality have found nothing but disappointment this year as the majority of 2020 memes rely on jokes about politics, the pandemic, riots and the world generally being on fire, both literally and figuratively. It makes sense – these are the hot topics, after all, and the meme community runs on hot topics – but it can be a bit tiring for those who just want to laugh.

Thankfully, there are still meme communities out there that act as safe havens from the issues of the world. One of the most popular examples of these is the gaming community.

Why Gaming Memes?

Gaming memes have been going through a bit of a boom lately. This year alone, we’ve seen tons of viral memes come out of new games like Warzone, Fall Guys, Doom Eternal, Animal Crossing, and now, the wildly popular Among Us.

Video games have always been a form of escapism, offering players entirely new worlds to get lost in … an understandable desire, especially in a year like 2020. Just look at how many Switches Animal Crossing has sold. Switch sales rose 166 percent when Animal Crossing came out, with Nintendo shipping over 61.4 million Switches in the second quarter of 2020 alone. According to recent polls, gaming, in general, has gone way up in the U.S. this year. An estimated three out of four Americans now play video games, which translates to about 244 million Americans total. That’s a lot of gamers, and considering the link between gamers and memers, it’s no surprise there have been a lot of gaming memes this year.

A lot of the most memed games of 2020 include multiplayer aspects, highlighting people's desires for community. People want nothing more than to get together like they used to before the pandemic, and gaming is one of the best ways to do this. When you get really into a round of Among Us with your friends, it’s hard to think of anything but the game, giving people a much needed moment of escape. People who have never even gamed before are now getting into the scene to remain social, and one of the main ways gamers stay social outside of gaming is through memes.

The Memes of Among Us

When you consider all this, it’s no surprise that Among Us has clicked with so many people. The indie title came out back in 2018, and while it was a sleeper hit in places like Brazil, it took until 2020 for North American and European streamers, like Sodapoppin and Kaif, to get their hands on it, leading to a huge increase in popularity.

The game sees up to 10 players take on the role of a spaceship crew, but with a twist — one of the players is an imposter. The real crewmates have to make their way around the ship and perform a series of tasks, while the imposter has to secretly kill the other crewmates to win. In-between killings, crewmates discuss who they think the imposter is and try to vote them out, while the imposter lies through their teeth to convince the others they’re a part of the crew.

Winning in Among Us relies on often wild allegations from crewmates and blatant lying from the imposter. This leads to a lot of fun in-game interactions, including plenty of lighthearted arguments about who to vote out and a lot of groundless accusations towards other players. Among Us memes play off these common, shared in-game occurrences.

Over on Reddit, /r/AmongUs is one of the biggest repositories of Among Us memes. Users over there are applying Among Us characters and situations to just about every classic meme format under the sun. They’re memeing on the overuse of the word “sus” to call out players, the shame felt when killing a player with a pet, the rush that comes when you see an imposter pop out of a vent, and the general feeling of being “on trial” at every moment.

Browsing through these memes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single political meme or comment. The subreddit even acts as a nice hit of nostalgia, as you’ll find every dead meme format under the sun applied to the game. These formats are made fresh with the new source material, making for some of the most wholesome and enjoyable memes of 2020. Among Us gamers clearly aren’t interested in bringing the whole world into their memes — they just want to know who killed the crewmate in electrical.

Finding Your Escape

You’ll find memes in any gaming community you explore, from competitive affairs like Fall Guys to more wholesome affairs like Animal Crossing. What you won’t find is a focus on politics or worldly tragedies, like you will on just about every broad meme page across the web.

You might find the occasional political or pandemic meme mixed in here and there, especially as the game ages and the meme juices start running dry. However, memes like this often aren’t the most popular, and sometimes they’re even revolted against. When Joe Biden's team announced they would release Biden lawn sign patterns in Animal Crossing, feelings over at /r/AnimalCrossing were a bit mixed, to say the least. Some saw it as a fine marketing strategy, while others plead to keep politics out of their favorite form of escapism. It's a pretty bold move for someone who vocally doesn't like gaming. This sparked more than a few heated debates in the comment sections of the subreddit, highlighting the exact issue with any political involvement in gaming — no matter how harmless, it causes division in the community.

Among Us is the No. 3 most played game on Steam at the time of this writing, and reached a massive 1.5 million concurrent players recently. It’s a big deal, and the memes surrounding it are only making it bigger. If you’re looking for somewhere to escape from all the depressing memes of 2020, you can find that place in the Among Us community, at least until the memes get stale and gamers move on to the next one.

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