Space Games And My Funky Autistic Brain
I really like space. Not just the physical concept of having space or my own space - don’t get me wrong, I live alone and it's fantastic. Being able to make tacos at 2 a.m. is one of the few reasons I have left to believe in a deity and the fact that no one can see the massive piles of clothes I dot around my flat like unwanted tundra tiles in a shit game of CIV5 is a leading factor in why people think I’m a functioning person. I like space space - the big empty nothing thing we float around in on the rock we call earth. I especially love it in video games - as a concept and a setting it's brilliant. I could go on and on about space in games and it would probably make a lovely article, but it's probably better for me to explain why I love space so much. At age fourteen I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, which is now more commonly diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). If you don’t know what autism is, the short answer in my case is that my brain is a little funky when it comes to my interests and social stuff.
People with autism can have special interests, and in my case it's fair to say my hyperfocus is on hyperdrives. Take Kerbal Space Program, for example. I love KSP - I am categorically bad at KSP, but it's the game I have the most hours in on Steam and quantitative data does not lie! I can barely make it to the moon and back with the ships I construct and yet I find myself drawn to the game without fail. What I like about the game is the freedom, but also the constraints it places on my concentration. I have to focus on the game entirely to actually do well - I can’t just point the rocket up at the sky, hope for the best and become an astronaut. From launch to orbit there are a hundred factors I have to take into account - things like thrust, weight, atmospheric density, angles of attack, why the hell the rocket is spinning when I turned on the fancy no-spin button. What this means for me is I have something I can fully focus on which, as someone with autism, is a rare thing. When I don't have something to fully focus on like my fancy rocket ship I tend to do a thing called ‘stimming’. It's where I do mental or physical stuff to occupy the bit of my brain that never really switches off. This is where fidget spinners came from.
Uh, hey. You guys? Was I meant to tie myself to something before going on a space walk?
Concentration is a massive part of my autism. I, like many people with autism, have trouble with concentration and I especially find it hard to concentrate on most tasks when I’m not stimming in some way. For example, I’m currently sitting in my uni cafe attempting to write this article and I’ve managed to smash in a whole bottle of apple juice in about five minutes because I cannot fully focus on just this Google Doc. Now that I’ve run out of apple juice I'm wiggling my toes. Stims! Stims for everyone!
Joking aside, you get the picture. My life gets a little bit more difficult to function in if I don’t have that stimming on the side, which is why games like KSP that manage to grab me and occupy my whole brain are as valuable as moon rocks. Space as a concept plays into this fantastically, especially in terms of game mechanics.
Take Avorion or Space Engineers - games that use a three-dimensional movement in space have this all-encompassing demand for focus I need to fully engage with the game. I know this is the case because of the number of times I’ve crashed in Forza because my mind slipped while following the racing line. Saying this will mean the DVLA is 100% going to take my licence away but; put me behind the wheel of a car and I’ll crash nine times out of ten but give me pitch, yaw and roll and I know what I’m doing.
Another good mechanic for this is ship management - being able to control each of the ship’s systems and crew is an awesome mechanic for my brain to handle because it essentially forms a stim my brain can focus on while flying through the infinite void. Occupying that little autism goblin in my brain (best way I can put it) is key to my gaming experience, and a lot of my favourite games have little bits and pieces it can pick up on.
They say deep sea welder is the world most dangerous job but deep space welder is the most dangerous job out of this world.
Gaming as an autistic person does affect what I play and how I play, but I want to make it clear that my experience as a gamer with autism is not a universal one. Autism is a condition (and I use ‘condition’ because I don’t personally consider my autism a disability) that spans a wide variety of types and effects. For example, some autistic people suffer from migraines, some are non-verbal - there are as many kinds of autism as there are autistic people. It affects people in different ways and not everyone with autism is going to like doing barrel rolls in the cold, dark expanse of space. I want to highlight what works for me, and I want to highlight what games can do for autistic people.
Our struggles more often than not come from a world constructed for neurotypical people - people who don’t have a condition like autism. For example, I wasn't allowed to fidget in school. Fidgeting was bad. To a neurotypical person, my stimming is a sign that I’m not paying attention but in reality the opposite is true. What's cool about games is that this logic is driven through the prism of gameplay - games are not fully constrained by the expectations of society because you cannot expect someone in a game to behave in a single pre-defined socially typical way. Ordering a Maccers and flying a starfighter are two very different social situations.
“Captain there is an inorganic mass of pixels dead ahead!”
“Scan for weapons. Boost shields. Enable v-sync!”
Social situations in games are also very different. To put it plainly, when the people you’re playing with are thrown into situations like flying the U.S.S Enterprise or fighting a whole ass dragon there are no set rules. Having a casual conversation has rules and constraints - stick that same casual conversation on a starship bridge and those roles and constraints get, quite literally, flung into space. In short, try making small talk with a Klingon and see how it goes. For example, my current Stellaris game with a few of my friends often devolves into arguments about whether or not we should wipe out the race of flying space squids that frequently attack our outposts. There's not a social norm for giant space squids - so we made one ourselves.
Games create new situations that bend the social rules built into society, forming new and open-ended situations that allow for people like me to create a new norm. Mechanics do this by allowing us to explore our way of doing things that might not have been the intention of the design, trying, experimenting and moving on. While narrative aspects such as being in hecking space change the expectations of those involved because there's only a handful of people who’ve experienced those conditions - no one is going to tell the first man on Mars he is not acting like everyone else.
Do you think the thing at the end of Dead Space 3 counts as a space squid?
Games are neutral ground for me as a person with autism because the social terms and rules of play have been negotiated by a range of people, and they allow for flexibility and adjustment with the introduction of new information and skills. Games without realising it have managed to exemplify how the world can adapt to people with brains outside the accepted norm, and they managed to do it with space squids. SPACE SQUIDS.
