GFH: Autistic Can Benefit From Games, Lots of Titles on the Way

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects 1 in 110 children, a number that is spurring the development of games designed to help those with the disorder. A panel today at Games for Health discussed some autism-specific titles that are currently in the works.

Rob Morris from the MIT Media Lab outlined one potential hurdle to developing such games—those with autism typically demonstrate very specific interests, meaning that any game must be adaptable to a particular patient. Morris demonstrated one way around this issue, a Flash/Action Script-based title that implements a custom Google image search in order to infuse a specific element—that the player can identify with—into the game. The hope is to eventually release an open source version of this game.

Autistics also tend to have an aversion, or over sensitivity, to sound. Morris discussed the case of a 26 year old male who could not stand the sound of coughing. A simple game was created that combined images of the subject’s favorite subjects (babies) and introduced coughing sounds (at low volume) as the man clicked through images. After a few weeks of training, with the volume of the sound being raised slowly, the man’s reaction to the sound of coughing went from 90% averse to only 10%.

Bill Fisher from Quiksilver Software discussed a series of games in development at his company. The games are focused on toddlers and children with autism and will focus on enforcing sharing, cooperation and empathy traits. In the cooperation game, for example, a virtual playmate named Zody will assist the player in collecting objects and putting them away. Zody has been pre-programmed to offer feedback and adapt to the player’s strategies.

The Center for Autism Research’s Susan Faja, in discussing the current state of autistic games, stated that 28 in-development titles were showcased at a recent conference, indicating an uptick in the response, at least from an interactive standpoint, to this disease.

The Center for Autism Research is at work on a suite of games under the label FaceStation. These titles are designed to improve facial recognition, as autistics tend to have difficulty recognizing faces and/or expressions. The Center has created seven Flash-based games so far, and plans to release them online, once the appropriate testing has been completed. One of the games featured Tetris-like gameplay that had users line up similar looking faces or expressions.

Moderator Russ Shilling called autism an epidemic, but emphasized that the autistic can be reached. Data shown by Faja indicated that the autistic do enjoy playing games, so perhaps all these titles in development will help those suffering from this disease just a little bit.