Gameplay Journal #8

“Auti-Sim”

Auto-Sim is a simple game that simulates what it is like to be an autistic child at a small park. The game expresses some obvious social/political influences such as childcare or modern medicine through its basic gameplay. However, I found that the game’s perspective choice is a mechanical manifestation of the developers value. You see the first person perspective is to develop intimacy and empathy in the player, so that can really experience the avatar’s journey. As mentioned in Flanagan’s and Nissenbaun’s article,

“seeing the game-world through the character’s eyes and collaborating with them to produce a desired result,” (Flanagan, 2007)

And that exactly what we do in the game. Collaborate to “survive” the simulation. This perspective does help to, as mentioned,

“cultivate sharing, cooperation, equality, or diversity.” (Flanagan 2007).

The second instance of meaning behind the game’s gameplay is in it’s mechanics that are behind-the-scenes. I could not figure out if the static rendering of the view and incoherent sounds were reacting to the players position in the park or just random or on a predestined cycle. I began to think, “is this the point?” To place us players in a simulation that could not only create a visual representation, but allow to experience the confusion that arises in atusitc kids. Overall I believe that the game’s simplistic design and carefully chosen attributes and mechanics all add to the exposition of the developer’s compassion for autism. Their aim to educate the mass by embedding this value into the game’s core mechanisms.

Work Cited

• Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. — CHI ‘07, 2007, doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.