A game to experience what it's like to have Autism.

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Make sure one of the traits is special interests. Like maybe someone is talking about playgrounds as that is one of my special interests. You know like what kinds of climbers, slides, panels, etc.? Basically any special interest where the person is so focused on one particular thing that no one else really cares about etc. Also for the school scene. Maybe you could express the academic troubles of autism like maybe the rest of the class is ready to move on with the notes and the teacher moved on to the next slide but because you have autism you write slower than most so you didn't get all the notes fast enough and you have to use the social Q's to ask the teacher for a copy of the notes etc. Also maybe show that you need more time for tests or a quieter environment to take tests in.

The quieter environment to take tests I have an idea of how to convey - due to heightened sensory/hearing i'm going to get the user to try and answer questions with a lot of irritating noises (which will make it frustrating).

As for the special interests - i'm really unsure of how to convey this! Apart from the character being calmer in-game whenn persuing them (i.e reducing stress levels). Do you have any ideas possibly?

I am sorry I didn't read 80% of the thread.

I have thought quite a bit about such a game and always wanted to program it. I am good at programming, but basically this is one of those ADHD ideas I have that don't output money and which I would never finish.

Here is my idea:
2D RPG style (SNES, SOE, SOM, etc.) mixed with 2D adventure style (like most SCUMM based games), most things hand-drawn, bare SDL cross-platform.
Character starts as an infant, you have a health bar, many people approach you and do things that subtract health. Scenes are semi-cinematic scenes of children being loved by their parents, shown off at parties for example or hugged and touched excessively. The point is to show that almost everything considered to be lovely affection and socially normal subtracts health points from you, hence is harmful and that everyone around you is ignorant against it. At the beginning you can only press space bar for quick-time events and your primary actions as an infant are 'resist' and 'avoid'. If your health drops below 0, you will lose control and have a meltdown and you have to recover by being alone and/or being mentally unresponsive. Also if it happens, you will receive a certain 'trauma score', which will disable you in your future development and future freedom of action. But experiencing trauma will also make you more resistant against the event (XX% less health points are lost) and it is to a certain degree unavoidable and part of the gameplay to receive trauma scores in a lot of areas, especially if you are an infant or a child. There should be about 4 of such cinematic stages. After those 4 scenes, you will be at home in your room and walk around and make discoveries. You will be able to do stimming behaviour which also recovers health, but only percentaged and if you do it too much your parents will punish you at random and you will again receive trauma points. Your room map will be recycled later for all stages where you live at your parents. If you successfully avoid enough trauma, you will discover the basic ideas of simple algebra, spatial metrics, set theory, syntax, semantics, walking, etc. by doing autism-typical behaviour like lining up things and repeating words and sentences over and over. If you don't, you will lack abilities and develop in a more ret*d fashion. You will also be punished by your parents at random for making discoveries and you will have to react with quick-time events.
The next stage in the game is joining the kindergarden. Depending on how much trauma you could avoid during the infant stage, you will either go to a normal kindergarden or a special school for metally ret*d children (which sets your live more or less up to failure and the game ends early because you will receive so little experience and so much trauma that it causes a game over, unless you are really good in which case the sequel will resume in a normal school, but you would lack a lot of experience and abilities you could have received in a normal kindergarden). So, if you are in normal kindergarden you will be able to walk around and advance your character. There are basically two aspects you can advance: your abilities/discoveries by playing alone and avoiding people and on the other hand social skills and language, by interacting. You will lose health points all the time if you are inside the kindergarden which you have to recover at home by being alone and hiding in your room in your cabinet or stimming. If you stim around people too much, they will do things that damage you. You will have to make certain social discoveries by interacting/playing with the children in kindergarden, but mostly it causes damage/trauma and prevents you from making discoveries and increasing abilities that are important later in the game. The hidden goal is to make only one friend in kindergarden.

I don't have much time to describe the rest. Basically you switch between scenes/maps in kindergarden/school and being at home and sometimes there will be cut scenes or different maps where your parents force you to do things or force you to do vacation. Lots of cinematic scenes should be added that show how your parents ideas of parenting cause damage to you and how they are ignorant of your condition and how that is harmful. E.g. your parents will force you to be on a birthday of another child, it will then inevetably cause so much damage that you meltdown. Also scenes could be added where your parents are alone and you observe them being concerned about you and thinking of solutions, but eventually they will choose to remain ignorant within their world-view.
The ultimate goal of the game would be to graduate from college and live alone, everything else leads to game overs. There could be different endings, which depend on your abilities and experience points. To summarize your character stats consist roughly of: trauma points in different areas, experience points in different areas (concerning behaviour/psychology), discoveries/abilities (act the same as permanent passive items in RPGs), number of friends, health, items that help you cope or advance your character. If you were to make the game really fancy, you could make the player chose intelligence, physical health, endurance, degree of autism, etc. at the beginning of the game.
The game should be really hard and condensed, such that only the right choices lead to success and wrong choices almost immediately cause permanent failure.

That's my idea.

Btw. about making faces unreadable, conveying sensory overload, etc.: That can't be done visually in a game it has to be done by game mechanics and events. People are used to the lack of facial expressions of characters and visual/auditory overflows in computer games, its pretty much the essence of computer gaming. Just play quake2 or something, loud scary noises, hard metal music, gunfire flashes and noises at a rate of 100 shots per minute all the time. The character's faces consist of whatever mutant one-expression one-texture sub 20 polygons only models. People are so used to that maximum level of overstimulating material that has been reduced to the very basics of the recognizable, to make it less programming effort and run with the hardware, that they won't even notice what you are trying to convey. Sure games have changed, play heavy rain for example, but still almost everyone is used to the old games, everyone has seen them and played them. In SNES RPGs, eyes would consist of two pixels and the mouth of 2-3. It can't get any more reduced than that. No one ever questioned a reduced abstract representation, like a cartoon face, to lack facial expressions or having only 10 possible facial expressions total. No one would understand if you were to convey something else with it.

More:

About faces: You could make a joke of cartoon faces in the game. For example you are inside the game, you can only observe the 1-2 facial expressions of the cartoon/manga/polygon faces, like it is normal in a computer game, and then you are required to judge things based on more complicated mimical expressions and non-verbal language which you obviously won't be able to do in any pre-2005 game. For example someone is really angry at you, but you won't see it through the game visually, neither is it made more obvious by what he says (like it would have been in a normal game). Then people scold you for being unable to recognise facial expressions if you don't give the right response by chance.

About making discoveries:
Those sequences could as well be 3D with physics engine. If you were to just show a desk/floor from the top and you could manipulate objects on the screen, it wouldn't be that hard to program but it would allow for much more freedom of action. In fact, it could be less programming effort eventually, if it were used often in the game. Imagine just loading some 3D models or hand-drawing all those from different angles in all their combinations. I would rather do the former, but then I am rather much more a programmer than an artist.

Music:
I like drum and bass and breakcore (and can create crude versions of it), but few people do and are familiar with it. The game could switch between normal music and dnb music, as part of switching the view between NT/AS. E.g. you are a infant and a cut scene starts with normal idyllic music, like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWGHDYZncTk&t=3s , then parents start saying cute stuff and begin to touch you excessively, that's when music like this fades in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ihdW-u5Mg&t=54s or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIbQUQpxFW8&t=63s and you begin losing health points and the screen fades slightly red and shakes a bit when you do and you have to press space to 'resist'. And the dialogue could be Mother: "Oh dear, why did he start crying?", Father: "I don't know, maybe he doesn't like being touched?", Mother: "Oh no! I know he just wants to be hugged." (Mother picks you up, you lose twice the health points) Mother: "You are such a cute baby.", Mother: "So cute." (Your health drops below zero, screen starts fading black, everything becomes silent, few seconds pause), Father: "There, he stopped crying.", Mother: "I know he just needed some love." (Next scene you wake up in your room alone)


EDIT: This game could be brilliant in my opinion, showing off to NTs how it is like to have autism more than words could convey. It could also be fun and challenging to play, offering pretty new and previously unseen game mechanics, like complex psychological stats and development and more detailed and technical 3D physics engine interactions than any other games have. Look at RAGE for example, you can build and combine items, but that is pretty much just done by collecting another item (blueprint) which allows you to click a single button to combine some stuff you collected. That's how far the 'building mechanisms' usually go in computer games. Minecraft is pretty much similar, except that you don't need a blueprint, instead you do some trial and error or look it up on the internet. In this game, building and discovering stuff could be much more of a main element.
Your goal really would be to develop a person from birth (and it isn't even that hard to program), no other game has that, because it wouldn't be interesting enough to play a normal kid who is growing up.
I guess though, no one would really accept the implications of what is shown, especially NT mothers because of emotional barriers. More or less, I guess it would just look too far fetched to show a kid being constantly hurt by the environment, people will just resort to reasoning with psychological models they are already familiar with, possibly reject the whole mechanics of the game. But then, how is that different from explaining autism to people in normal language ...

Like you and I might have noticed, I am really excited about programming this game. Some people maybe start to paint/draw to resolve trauma or emotional issues as a therapeutic method. This is very similar, maybe even better because the range of possible expression is bigger.
Maybe it is the same to you. The game should still be kind of realistic though, no matter how strong the emotional memories or experiences of me/you are behind it. If we could get a team of 5-8 people, ideally 3-4 good programmers 1-2 for music, 2-3 for drawing, the game (at least the one I have in mind) could have a real chance. Obviously you would need skill. If you do and are interested, please respond.

EDIT: What do I mean by skill, if you don't know .. Look at this woman's channel and this video for a bad example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYrS54WH96Q or this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiBKvlePmwg . That's how games look if you invest maybe 5-15 hours total, have very poor programming abilities (e.g. you started learning C# 1 month before that and never did much programming before learning C# your life) and you have no artistic skills at all, neither visually or with music AND you did everything on your own. It is amateurish and sh***y and people only like to play such games for 10 minutes after having their laugh about them and they stop being funny. Regarding skills, it needs to be way better than that. That means investing more time primarily, but also the ability to produce some quality works.

I have taken part in those sort of simulations and while they were interesting, I came out of them with no idea whatsoever what life is like for a blind, deaf or wheelchair-using person. (It was for an acting class.)

When blindfolded I still had visual memories and used those to guide myself. I kept super-imposing my best guess of what things looked like, using touch and sound to augment that guess. But I still mentally contructed a visual representation of the world that I could temporarily not see.

When wearing headphones I still had auditory memories and used those to construct a best guess of what people were saying. I could "hear" them in my head rather than actually reading lips.

When in a wheelchair I had difficulty navigating the obstacle course the teacher created (as people in wheelchairs could have difficulty navigating areas that are not wheelchair accesable) but didn't feel any true frustration because none of those places were actually closed off to me and I could get to them as soon as I got up out of the wheelchair. So I had no true experience of inaccessability.

In the same way, any game would give the illusion of successful simulation while leaving the NT person with no experience whatsoever of what it was like to be autistic. No amount of strobing lights, inexplicable actions of other characters or any of the excellent suggestions given would actually give any true understanding. Just as putting a blindfold on somebody doesn't get them to know what it's like to be blind (or even to lose their sight to illness or injury), no game can convey what the actual difference in neurology feels like. Even if I (an NT) played a game with aggravating sound and visual effects, inexplicable characters and slow recover time etc., I would still process this information- weird and unfamiliar though it would be- in an NT top down fashion. A game can alter the inputs that somebody gets but it can't alter the way those inputs are processed, which is where the actual difference is.

@Janissy: People with autism just think differently, they don't have any lack of something (like the ability to see or walk). This means, that you can easily switch roles in a game. You can make the autism processing 'right' and the NT processing 'wrong', forcing people to accept that their character works differently than they think or want and that they (and people who the character represents) can't just ignore this circumstance, instead they have to work and think with what they got.
I brought up quite some examples in my idea of the game. If you e.g. try to make too much social contact in kindergarten (like a normal child would and should), it will cause trauma and set you up for failure by game mechanics, because that is what a child with autism would experience if it were forced by some ultimate external control (which is exactly what the game player is) to do that. Similarly, the game requires you to do autism-typical behavior in order to advance properly. This however conflicts, like it does in reality, with parenting and social rules, which is the main challenge of the game. The game forces you to realise what is bad and what is good for you and to develop coping mechanisms, like a child/person with autism does in one way or the other.
You don't need to actually see how it is like to experience visual/tactile/auditory overload, you just have to realise that it is bad for you in the game. This is done by said game mechanics. Games essentially consist just of abstract representations. If some pixel flies towards you and you lose health when it does, it doesn't matter what it would feel like to be hit by some fictional energy weapon, you don't need to feel the pain of a bullet entering your flesh, neither some complicated realistic graphics of the wound to realize that it did hurt you. What you need is just a health bar and the fact that you die and lose if your health is gone. It is an abstract representation of simple circumstances. You are forced to accept that in the game, the pixel is harmful and that you need to avoid it.
Computer games are not just eyecandy. People wrote and enjoyed computer games even 30 years ago, when there was just text output. It is all about game mechanics.

Btw. that doesn't mean they can't be good, or helpful or meaningful. The art is to convey just the right thing. It is like making a movie, but longer and better. True, no one can actually convey what it was like to be a soldier in the Vietnam war ... but you can still make good meaningful movies about it. You don't need to give someone a lifetime of war experience to show what it is like.

Btw.#2: Characters in games are never 100% controllable such that the player becomes the character. Obviously the player plays a character with autism in the game in order to experience what it is like. It is not that the player has to become autistic first in order to be the character in the game in the first place. That would be entirely backwards. Therefore, the player doesn't need to have any handicaps or lifetime experiences or coping skills, because the character in the game does and he/she acts accordingly, providing essentially qualitatively identical situations in the game, however much of it can be represented anyway in the abstract graphics and simplified fashion any game works.

Compaq I'd have loved to have work with you on this =(. Unfortunately I have chosen it as a University project (because I wanted to do it and needed a project also so thought having it as a university thing would encourage me to do it).

This means all the programming needs to be done by myself but I can take as much feedback and do as much research as possible (all of which I will credit authors). When finish and submit it as a project however in a years time - i'll be making it open source and available for everyone - if you'd like to join then we can arrange to put a team together? What kind of skills do you have?

I reeeeeeally want to continue after university making tools for autism, adhd and for neurotypicals to learn about autism/adhd (as well as tools for carers).

Do you have a year time? You pretty much cannot develop a quality game with storyline alone, except it is really primitive, like Mario Brothers 1 or Tetris. I am not really into a 'half-baked' version, university and school projects tend to be like that, unless you are exceptionally good.

My skills are high enough in programming (I am picky though about clean programming solutions), but if it comes to drawings I just need lots of time because it isn't in my skill-set. I do use lots of digital tools for drawing, like a tablet PC and rearranging parts of photographs or 3D models to get shapes right. It is often easier for me to create something crude in blender first and then draw it by screenshot, because drawing from scratch is very annoying. I can create music (only Jeskola Buzz), but then again not that professionally. Should be enough for background music though.

What can you do?

Dilemma : There is no mutual reference-point with which to calibrate such a program in order to ensure effective results.

In other words... someone who is aut-kin has always been aut-kin and exclusively has an aut-kin perspective... while a mundane has always been mundane and exclusively has a mundane perspective. Without ever having seen things from their perspective and known the difference between the two first-hand, how could you possibly know how to show them our perspective?


As an aside, when mundies start asking questions... I just tell them "You're a dog, I'm a cat. Deal with it". Mundies seem to respond well to weird non-literal stuff like that... or just about anything that will let them put you in an arbitrary category, assume they know you and then promptly lose interest.

Everything can be understood cognitively. People with AS have to learn how to emulate NT thinking and understand NTs to some degree in order to survive. Some can do it better than others. I have talked to quite some people and got insights and also I have taken loads of psychotropic substances in the past and went through long-term therapy and what not which helped me to understand things about myself and others and the human mind in general. Sure, I am not NT and have difficulties, but personally I don't see any considerable problem in showing things from one or the other 'angle'. Look at movies for example, that's all about NT perspectives. It is just a matter of copying things you already have seen and using some intelligence and time to combine it into something coherent.
Especially if you consider that you can put loads of time and consideration into a game that you don't have otherwise in real-time situations. If you program a 15 seconds cut-scene, that might even take you 2 hours, plenty of time to refine the result. And the game would be about showing the autism perspective primarily anyway.

Then you might have a chance, but I'm not sure you'll ever know that you got it right.
Emulating the surface interactions of a mundie is one thing... but the inner workings? That is another entirely. A parrot might know a few words, and it might even have a grasp of the context in which to use them, but it will never know what they mean.

At least we have an advantage in this case. There are a LOT more of them than there are us to learn from. Plus of course we tend to be more rationally minded on average than they are... though that can hinder as well as help. Simulating irrationality by rational means is... awkward.

You're correct . But I think I have someone who does a close enough job.

My brother has aspergers - my mum spent 8 years trying to understand him and she found due to her aspergers traits to some extent she already did(although she has stronger adhd than AS). She struggled but she tried every method she could to encourage him to express his difficulties - and they worked together so he learnt how to explain in a way she could understand and they could work together. Her understanding of people in phenomenal - she grew up with 3 autistic brothers and 4 other adhd siblings.

She now gives presentations to parents/professionals/carers/social workers/schools giving visual and interactive workshops to explain what it's like to have autism. One example is using sand paper to explain what it's like for an autistic child to wear clothes (wearing clothes is comparable to wearing sand paper). The feedback from these presentations has been amazing.

I may not have a direct mutual reference point - but I still at least have someone who I think has good experience in working for the same goal - just i'd like to try and achieve this through a game/computer .

Pming you .
It's a 2 year University project - and accounts for a third of my ENTIRE degree(including masters)! So i'm definitely not wanting a half-baked thing .

I don't know what to tell you to do but this is a good idea