RMS Gigantic
Member
There's a lot of diversity topics active today, and I made some of these points in those topics, but none of those topics were quite related to diversity as it pertains to mental and developmental disorders. Thus, I decided to make a thread on this specific topic.
There's a variety of mental disorders where the people diagnosed with them would mostly prefer societal acceptance rather than a "cure", including OCD, ADHD, and Tourette syndrome, but I have PDD-NOS, which is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) along with the more famous Asperger Syndrome and "classic" autism, so my post from here on out will explore how I believe the autism spectrum disorders could be effectively represented in video games. I encourage discussion in this thread about how other disorders could be represented by video game characters and how that might affect gameplay, characterization, and plot! I am not talking about other disorders in this post, however, because I do not know very much about other disorders, only the autism spectrum.
To start with, some might be wondering why large video game companies would be interested in creating a video game protagonist that caters to the autistic demographic of all people. After all, so comparatively few games have female protagonists because women on the whole don't play narrative-centric video games very often. The fact of the matter is, however, that autistic people spend more time playing video games than those without mental disorders. I can't find any demographics on what percentage of video game players as a whole is on the autism spectrum, but given factors such as autism's greater diagnosis rate in males (there's debate as to whether autism is legitimately rarer in females or the two genders have the same rate but females are just better at hiding it), I would bet that, like engineering, video games have a disproportionately large autistic population. In particular, though, the fact that autistic people spend, on average, more time playing video games than neurotypical people do ("neurotypical" as an adjective or noun refers to a person without a mental disorder), it seems as though the idea of video game companies giving the player a main character they can relate to should, at least occasionally, mean that the main character might be autistic, have Asperger Syndrome, or have PDD-NOS.
Beyond just being a token character included only to represent an under-represented demographic, though, a character on the autism spectrum could support certain video game tropes. For example, if Grand Theft Auto had a protagonist with a high IQ and an autistic spectrum disorder, who owned and/or whose narrow interests included or involved motorcycles, cars, trucks, jets, and boats, it could provide justification for how the character knows how to operate all of these various vehicles so effectively! Plus, about 0.60 percent of criminals fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, so it's not too unusual to appear in a GTA game in at least some capacity. Among these, too, apparently arson cases fairly frequently lead back to someone who is on the autism spectrum, or can end up stalking people due to unfamiliarity with or disregard for social precedent, both of which, in my opinion, would make for an apt GTA series character, even if only a supporting character. For clarification, because I have had this brought up multiple times: this is obviously not a good place to start, since portraying people with mental disorders as criminals would not exactly start the diversity concept on the right foot (and it's done fairly frequently already). This paragraph was put here to describe how having an autistic character in a game wouldn't be as boring as some people might initially believe.
The subject of autistic spectrum criminals raises another point in favor of autism representation as well: unlike what some people *coughbigbangtheorywriterscough* believe, writing a character as having an ASD does not necessarily limit what they realistically can do in the narrative. People on the autism spectrum have led to societal leaps (Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla are often speculated to be on the autism spectrum, were they alive today) and Miss Montana in 2013 (who came in 15th in the Miss America pageant) had PDD-NOS. People on the autism spectrum disorder obviously do a lot of, at times stereotype-violating, things.
Speaking of stereotypes, now is the time where I wish to discuss current video game portrayals of autism. Most often, these come in one of two categories: the first category is characters who are explicitly stated by the game or the game creator to be autistic, but whose characterizations are either minimal (from what I can tell, David Archer from Mass Effect 2) or exaggerated/not down-to-earth (Patrica Tannis from Borderlands 2, Jade from Fahrenheit), and the second category is where the characters are plausible depictions of someone on the autism spectrum, but neither the game or its creator ever officially declare that the character has an ASD (River Wyles from To The Moon). The main issue I have here is that no game creator seems to consciously create accurate depictions of autism and its related disorders.
I was about to go on for several more paragraphs about how would be a good method for creating an autistic character, or how an autistic character can have a character arc without the ultimate narrative goal being to "cure" the character (neurodiversity proponents who have mental disorders themselves will most often tell you that if a cure were somehow found for their neurological abnormality, they wouldn't take it), but I realize now that that would produce a text wall to end all text walls (even larger than it is now, perhaps doubly so), so I'll cut this post here.
Who here has a disorder that they would be interested in seeing represented in a video game character? Are there any game developers here who are interested in the prospect of including a character with a mental, neurological, or developmental disorder? Are there any objections to what I've listed so far or the idea of acknowledging neurodiversity as a whole? Let the discussion begin!
There's a variety of mental disorders where the people diagnosed with them would mostly prefer societal acceptance rather than a "cure", including OCD, ADHD, and Tourette syndrome, but I have PDD-NOS, which is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) along with the more famous Asperger Syndrome and "classic" autism, so my post from here on out will explore how I believe the autism spectrum disorders could be effectively represented in video games. I encourage discussion in this thread about how other disorders could be represented by video game characters and how that might affect gameplay, characterization, and plot! I am not talking about other disorders in this post, however, because I do not know very much about other disorders, only the autism spectrum.
To start with, some might be wondering why large video game companies would be interested in creating a video game protagonist that caters to the autistic demographic of all people. After all, so comparatively few games have female protagonists because women on the whole don't play narrative-centric video games very often. The fact of the matter is, however, that autistic people spend more time playing video games than those without mental disorders. I can't find any demographics on what percentage of video game players as a whole is on the autism spectrum, but given factors such as autism's greater diagnosis rate in males (there's debate as to whether autism is legitimately rarer in females or the two genders have the same rate but females are just better at hiding it), I would bet that, like engineering, video games have a disproportionately large autistic population. In particular, though, the fact that autistic people spend, on average, more time playing video games than neurotypical people do ("neurotypical" as an adjective or noun refers to a person without a mental disorder), it seems as though the idea of video game companies giving the player a main character they can relate to should, at least occasionally, mean that the main character might be autistic, have Asperger Syndrome, or have PDD-NOS.
Beyond just being a token character included only to represent an under-represented demographic, though, a character on the autism spectrum could support certain video game tropes. For example, if Grand Theft Auto had a protagonist with a high IQ and an autistic spectrum disorder, who owned and/or whose narrow interests included or involved motorcycles, cars, trucks, jets, and boats, it could provide justification for how the character knows how to operate all of these various vehicles so effectively! Plus, about 0.60 percent of criminals fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, so it's not too unusual to appear in a GTA game in at least some capacity. Among these, too, apparently arson cases fairly frequently lead back to someone who is on the autism spectrum, or can end up stalking people due to unfamiliarity with or disregard for social precedent, both of which, in my opinion, would make for an apt GTA series character, even if only a supporting character. For clarification, because I have had this brought up multiple times: this is obviously not a good place to start, since portraying people with mental disorders as criminals would not exactly start the diversity concept on the right foot (and it's done fairly frequently already). This paragraph was put here to describe how having an autistic character in a game wouldn't be as boring as some people might initially believe.
The subject of autistic spectrum criminals raises another point in favor of autism representation as well: unlike what some people *coughbigbangtheorywriterscough* believe, writing a character as having an ASD does not necessarily limit what they realistically can do in the narrative. People on the autism spectrum have led to societal leaps (Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla are often speculated to be on the autism spectrum, were they alive today) and Miss Montana in 2013 (who came in 15th in the Miss America pageant) had PDD-NOS. People on the autism spectrum disorder obviously do a lot of, at times stereotype-violating, things.
Speaking of stereotypes, now is the time where I wish to discuss current video game portrayals of autism. Most often, these come in one of two categories: the first category is characters who are explicitly stated by the game or the game creator to be autistic, but whose characterizations are either minimal (from what I can tell, David Archer from Mass Effect 2) or exaggerated/not down-to-earth (Patrica Tannis from Borderlands 2, Jade from Fahrenheit), and the second category is where the characters are plausible depictions of someone on the autism spectrum, but neither the game or its creator ever officially declare that the character has an ASD (River Wyles from To The Moon). The main issue I have here is that no game creator seems to consciously create accurate depictions of autism and its related disorders.
I was about to go on for several more paragraphs about how would be a good method for creating an autistic character, or how an autistic character can have a character arc without the ultimate narrative goal being to "cure" the character (neurodiversity proponents who have mental disorders themselves will most often tell you that if a cure were somehow found for their neurological abnormality, they wouldn't take it), but I realize now that that would produce a text wall to end all text walls (even larger than it is now, perhaps doubly so), so I'll cut this post here.
Who here has a disorder that they would be interested in seeing represented in a video game character? Are there any game developers here who are interested in the prospect of including a character with a mental, neurological, or developmental disorder? Are there any objections to what I've listed so far or the idea of acknowledging neurodiversity as a whole? Let the discussion begin!
