The authenticity of American politicians can be measured by any number of fuzzy metrics. Perhaps you’ve heard the most famous one, “He seems like a guy I could grab a beer with.” There’s no particular way to measure the beerosity of a public figure, but you know it in your gut. The beer represents a concern—is this person even vaguely normal and do they understand normal things?—that has perhaps grown more pertinent after the last four years. Last night on Twitch, a new version of the beer metric was born: “She seems like someone I could stream with.”
In an effort to get out the vote, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar played the game Among Us with a group of popular streamers on Twitch. If you don’t already know, Twitch is an extremely popular website where you can watch people play video games live, and see other people comment and react to the gameplay in real-time. To be a good Twitch streamer, you need to be technically proficient at a game and also a solid MC who can be engaging even when nothing exciting is happening—ideally both. A central appeal of the whole thing is the idea that the person playing on stream is just a normie who found fame and fortune by doing something they love.
Among Us involves a team of players who run around a small spaceship performing arbitrary tasks. The twist is that one or two of them is actually an impostor whose job is to sabotage the others or, if they can get a teammate alone, ruthlessly murder the whole squad one by one. It’s a bit like the children’s game Mafia, or if the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None took place on the Starship Enterprise. Normal crewmates win by discovering impostors or completing all their tasks, and impostors win by killing everyone else.
If a player discovers a body or gets paranoid, they can call an emergency meeting—and that’s where the real game begins. Now everyone is allowed to talk, and lob accusations, suspicions, and defenses. Then everyone votes on who they think is the imposter, and the player with the most votes gets ejected into space.
Because Among Us is built entirely around social engineering and deception, it’s fun to watch politicians like Ocasio-Cortez and Omar play it. For most of American history, the electorate has held its representatives to high standards of honesty. Theoretically, being caught in a lie is one of the worst things that can happen to a politician. So it’s at least a little illuminating to see what it looks like when a politician has to be deceptive. In the first game of the night, where AOC was an impostor, and she largely stayed quiet during discussions. When it was her turn to suss out potential killers in the next game, she was a lot more outspoken. (In a subsequent round, Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were the two impostors trying to pick off everyone else—a scenario that might hold more resonance for certain political affiliations.)
Twitch streams are largely homespun operations, produced by the streamer themselves or—if you do it professionally—a small crew. The technical difficulties, the less-than-perfectly framed shots are part of the appeal. For image-conscious politicians, appearing anywhere without professional production and studio lighting might be seen as a risk. But Ilhan Omar’s daughter and staff apologized for the hitches, blaming poor wi-fi. Congresswomen—they’re just like us! And Ocasio-Cortez switched between audio channels easily, talking to the audience while she narrated. When the conversation naturally turned to a discussion of the terrible state of American healthcare in the stream’s third hour, it didn’t feel out of place or stilted at all.
For most people, streaming video games on Twitch isn’t an attempt to get famous—it’s just a way to hang out, like going to a bar to watch a game. Representatives can’t meet constituents at bars (or diners or state fairs) right now, so the most forward-thinking are figuring out how to reach them where they hang out online. And not just to talk at them, but to talk with them.
As younger people who grew up with YouTube, with Twitch, with smartphones and computers that let them produce, edit, and go live with a few simple taps, we’re going to see more candidates who they grew up with the internet, and know it innately. Consider how quickly this event came together—AOC floated an idea on Twitter and 24 hours later she was doing it. For most politicians, public appearances like this take lots of vetting and prep work. For others, it just takes the push of a button.