The Secret Lives of Video Game Characters

Is or Are?

If the subject is singular, use is: The dog is barking. If the subject is plural, use are: The cats are meowing. What about there is and there are? Look at what comes next: There is one apple; there are two bananas.

Among Us became wildly popular last year during the pandemic. The space-themed game provided a fun way for people to socialize and connect while stuck at home. 

In the game, players is/are either crewmates or impostors. Impostors try to kill the crewmates without getting caught. Crewmates try to figure out who the impostors is/are—without getting killed. 

The crewmates is/are simply drawn—and you can customize them, adding chef  hats or giving them pets, for example. Our favorite accessory? The toilet plunger.

In Pac-Man, players eat their way through a maze as they try to avoid getting gobbled up by googly-eyed ghosts. Pac-Man was created back in the 1970s by Toru Iwatani, who wanted to make a game that didn’t involve shooting and blowing things up. 

Iwatani says the idea for Pac-Man came to him while he was eating pizza. That’s why Pac-Man is/are shaped like a pizza pie and his mouth is/are shaped like a pizza slice. Nom nom.

Today, Mario is/are one of the biggest names in video games; there is/are more than 200 Nintendo games starring the mustachioed character in the blue overalls and red cap. But when Mario first appeared in 1981, he was called Jumpman. 

Why was his name changed? Nintendo employees thought that Jumpman looked like Mario Segale, the man who owned Nintendo’s warehouse in the U.S. The character’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, loved the name Mario so much that he changed Jumpman’s name. 

There is/are a story behind Mario’s cap too. Back in the ’80s, video game designers didn’t have the digital tools available today. Creating hair that moved realistically while Mario jumped and ran would have been impossible. So Miyamoto came up with a brilliant solution: Give him a cap!