US Politician AOC Streamed Her Playing Among Us While Rallying for Votes

It looks like Among Us is truly the pinnacle right now.

Having started out as a space-themed game with minimal downloads back in 2018, it has since ballooned in popularity: so much so that online pages are fraught with mentions of it and everyone from your Aunt Matilda to your Grandpa Bob is playing it.

But how exactly does one determine a game as the pinnacle? Well, lest you haven’t latched on, my observation is based off the topic headline.

Because when it becomes a platform for an actual US politician to rally votes, you know that it’s no longer a mere game.

US Politician Streamed Her Playing Among Us While Rallying for Votes

According to Forbes, nearing 700,000 people turned up on Twitch just to see Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez play the hit video game Among Us.

And she wasn’t even half-naked like 99% of the gamer girls out there.

On 20 October 2020, the 31-year-old representative from New York went against all conventional tactics when she took to Twitch to rally votes.

Nearly 700,000 people logged on to watch her play with several streamers and fellow Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Around 440,000 people viewed the AOC-established Twitch stream at the peak point of the broadcast, while another 200,000 followed individual broadcasts by gaming stars Pokimane, Jacksepticeye, HasanAbi and Moistcr1tikal.

Before the game commenced, AOC had urged viewers to partake in the upcoming presidential election.

“We are here to vote blue,” she says. “We have the ability to vote Trump out of office, to vote for a Biden-Kamala ticket. Let’s make sure we change this country.”

It should be noted that the virtual campaign reportedly came together in just one day. On the day itself, she tweeted that she wished to play Among Us, and invited her 9.1 million strong Twitter army to join her.

Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun)

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 19, 2020

Not As Cringe As Expected

Though the live-stream had a more “meaningful” purpose than just casual Internet gaming and hooking middle-aged men into splashing out thousands of dollars, the politician did reasonably well considering her capacity.

In the comments section of a compilation video (of all her ‘top moments’), for instance, responses were largely positive.

It registered 108,670 views in the span of a day, and has a 7K to 1.7K like-dislike ratio.

One Netizen commended the congresswoman’s efforts, stating that she “did really good”.

He also appraised how she had “encouraged voting”, but not been too pushy in her attempt.

“When I heard about this I expected waaaaay more cringe…but honestly she did really good,” he said. “She had all the familiar audio struggles of a someone new to streaming. Her stream wasn’t over produced. She encouraged voting but didn’t push any politics. She played for way longer than I thought she would. She seemed to have fun interacting with people closer to her age than some of her coworkers. ha.”

The comment has since collected over 1.9K upvotes.

Meanwhile, another acknowledge the ingenuity of the whole “campaign”, stating that she got a lot of exposure with this stream alone (other than the documentary that relates her win in Congress, of course).

“This was actually so smart on her, so mad props,” said the Netizen. “The amount of people that just got exposure to her is no joke. I’ll admit that I didn’t know who she was before today 😂”

And it seems that the congresswoman’s gaming ability, just like her political prowess, isn’t to be doubted.

“AOC is actually good at Among Us!” said another. “There are some hardcore gamers that I’ve seen that didn’t preform as well as she did.”

But of course, what’s a political stream without mention of a potentially orange-haired imposter?

“I think Donald Trump was trying to follow her into electrical,” said one.

Not The First Time

For the record, this is not the first time the congresswoman “plied her trade” on an online live-streaming platform.

Back in May, the young politician had played Animal Crossing: New Horizons with several people she encountered on social media platform Twitter.

Even then, she was praised for being forward-thinking with her tactics.

Among Us

In Among Us, players race around a cartoonish-looking ship, and aim to accomplish tasks without getting killed in the process.

A game can have 4-10 players, and room creators will decide on the number of imposters beforehand, with the figure being 1-3.

Throughout the session, imposters will have to pretend to be normal players to prevent getting caught. Along the way, they are supposed to ‘sabo’ other players and eliminate them one by one.

Meetings will be conducted to weed out these supposed ‘imposters’.

The game, which is developed by American game studio InnerSloth, was released in June 2018 to minimal fanfare. In fact, developer Amy Liu once revealed that the game struggled to have more than 10 concurrent players during its initial stages.

Talks of a sequel have occurred, though the developers are hesitant on making its newfound player base change to a new title just yet.