Study: Playing D&D helps autistic players in social interactions
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
What makes it really humorous is how incredibly well it captures the particulars of an actual session, most notably the socially awkward interactions and in-jokes which normally would have been the focus of bullying, but in this space resonate as the sort of very earnest fun play they were intended as.
Having these places to go to, when the rest of your week is full of generally challenging interactions designed to tear people down, can be absolutely incredible sources needed to build up a sense of self-worth.
D&D in some ways was possibly the place where the proto-seed for this kind of nerd-safe place was created. There may be some prior versions of this, maybe golden age Sci-fi book clubs or Trek gatherings or something, but D&D seems to be where it particularly gelled and crystalized hard. It's no wonder that it became part of the 80's moral panic since it threatened to provide a place where nerd culture could find itself and took a measure of control away from those in charge of the panic with regards to how one should behave and think.
Today there are many many of these kinds of environments, and in a sense when formed a certain way like Open Source Software, have turned global industries upside-down. But even competitive card playing tournaments, demoscene parties, cosplay conventions, video game conventions, and so on are all an outgrowth of what D&D really started.
My heart swells when I see little nerd culture shops that sell comic books and manga and figurines have signs out front for "Boardgame Thursdays!" or "Magic Tournament this Saturday!" Because there will for certain be at least one person who attends, who had an absolutely terrible month being shat on by most of the people they encounter, and will thrive in this place. Where it's safe to joke, be yourself, have fun. And that confidence and those social encounters might be not just enough to turn a nerdy kid into a CTO, but could also keep them away from the deep black hole of self-worthlessness, depression, and maybe worse.
I’m reminded in turn of Foucaults concept of heterotopia (‘other place’ or ‘place of otherness’) where things are different by design. The otherness of such spaces is one of their goals: they are there to provide an outlet for something or to hide or shield certain activities or thoughts (separating discourse).
As a child I was taken out of school for a while because I couldn’t cope and caused trouble. I was sent to a place for gifted children and met a lot of neurodivergent kids. It wasn’t a DnD gameroom but it was so explicitly outside the norm that I could put myself back together and reenter society on my own terms. I’ve been attracted to such places ever since, even running my own community center for a couple of years.
So uh, totally agree with what you said and all of the above is just to add that there’s a lot more heterotopias than one might think.
https://columbophile.com/2019/10/27/episode-review-columbo-t...
Enjoy it, don't become like me
Though, both groups I've played it with consisted of close seasoned players, none of whom I was particularly comfortable with, which isn't the best introduction. I'm curious how much the particular setup in the study affected the outcome, with the social reference sheets and presumably other unique factors - with how much D&D can vary based on the DM and players, it'd be interesting to see this study done with a variety of DMs guiding things in different ways.
However. After that, my husband and I joined a D&D club where the campaigns are 16 weeks long. Every few months you're at a new table with new players and new characters. I found that to be a lot more tolerable, and has really improved my social skills. The thing about clubs like this is there's always new people playing for the first time, and no one takes anything too seriously. Plenty of room to fuck up without real consequence.
On the other hand, after four or five seasons, I'm real sick of short form campaigns and the lack of routine or continuity. It's also pretty tiring to invent a new persona for a character all the time.
am curious, could you elaborate a touch on these? TIA
In a combat scene with 4 party members and 4 enemies, 7/8 of the time it's not your turn. And if you're playing a simple character that just hits with a sword, while other players are wizards with dozens of spells to choose between their turns will naturally take longer.
Computer games are much faster paced.
As for what I mean by narrative, much of the appeal of D&D seems to lie in crafting the story and adventure, being a part of the plot. If the setting and narrative were completely removed, and the game was reduced down to the most basic mechanical actions - go to location x,y and do foo to bar, etc., it would be a very different game.
Not to say the mechanical aspects don't make up part of the appeal of D&D and other TTRPGs too, but they're not a focus as much as in, say, a computer strategy game, or even something like an action platformer, where that is the game, and story/characters/etc. make up little (if any) of the gameplay.
If you want to exercise your brain while waiting on your turn do like high-level chess players and think during other people's turns, I find that fun. Think how the recent decisions or rolls modify the state of the battlefield or your chances of victory.
That's what I was after. I know some people play in a much more involved way but when I played so many years ago I love the plot and setting, but really worked the mechanics. It may have been you got a DM or group that was just not suited to you.
However, I think that GURPS can be OK for combat as well as narrative and other stuff. If you use many expansions books as well, then more options are possible. GURPS combat also has many options, and also I like the rules better than D&D in many ways. (Still, I think there are some problems with GURPS, and had tried to make up SciRPS to be better (in my opinion). Although GURPS has many skills, I think too many things are often combined in one skill; e.g. Brawling skill involves all unarmed combat (by punch, kick, claws, bite, horns, etc), but if you are skilled at only biting but not punch/kick, then it doesn't do that; skill of Morse code is the same skill as operating the communications devices to use it and are not separated; etc. "Point-free" helps a bit with this, but I think that it could be improved further, which is what I intended with SciRPS.)
To me, the RPG is that you can have many things together, including combat, magic spells, narrative, strategy/tactics, etc. This is what makes it what it is, rather than a computer game which is a different kind of game.
Although you might have plans (and the GM might have plans), many things will happen unexpectedly, due to what others are doing, due to the results of dice, etc, so that is another thing that RPG is.
It's really 4e and 5e that simplified the game in huge ways. 5e kinda-sorta added some complexity back to it, but got rid of a lot of smaller numerical bonuses in favor of the advantage/disadvantage system.
But yeah, I definitely get where you're coming from with respect to the latest editions feeling more video-gamey. AD&D 2e and earlier had this distinctly simulationist feeling, where the intent was that you were in a world where you had to survive first and foremost and could maybe get some gold and glory if you were lucky, whereas 3e and later definitely drifted more into a "your party is/contains the main character(s) of this world" type paradigm which probably led to a lot of the more recent mechanical decisions.
It's a bit like the difference between a traditional roguelike vs a modern roguelike. One is a world simulation and you're on your own, the other is a game where you will win if you keep trying.
The difference maker seems to be that well done D&D games, with good DMs, force the players to interact with each other and problem solve together. Which, to me, suggests there's nothing particularly special about D&D beside it being something that people on the spectrum like --- what is special is the social interaction and problem solving. It would be interesting to see how gender plays into further studies. In my experience, autism in women can often look quite different than autism in men (generalizing of course).
Players are allowed to play someone with a completely different personality, and spend extended amounts of time stepping into someone else's head and thinking how someone different would act.
There aren't any other situations in life where you can take someone socially awkward and say "ok now act really charismatic" and then, w/o judgement, that person spends 2 or 3 hours a week for months on end trying to figure out what a charismatic person would say and do.
As in, given an end state you can trace back the series of events and actions to how you got there. So for a character in a movie or in a story or in a DND campaign, you can look at where they're at, and then trace back and find out how they got there. Even in pretty complicated movies, because the audience needs to know and understand what's going on.
But people aren't like that generally, because you don't have enough knowledge typically and you don't necessarily know why people are the way they are. Feelings can come up for no reason, or for a reason you can't identify. They can even come 40 years ago, perhaps their inception when you were a baby.
You talk about "excess of thinking" and complexity, and I think this sort of points to that.
Movies, characters, DND can be rationalized. Humans, their feelings, and their actions, often can't. Not because they're more complex, but because people aren't rationale beings. Most people can't pinpoint where their own feelings stem from and it takes years of therapy to find that out - let alone the feelings of others. And, even worse, the feelings of those you don't know well.
Fantasy and sci-fi themes in media can be complex, but, in my experience, the people I know on the spectrum are far more drawn to fare of a particular kind: systems focused and morally clear-cut. Complexity for them is often more about scale. They'll pick a Brandon Sanderson book/series over a Gene Wolfe book (or Peake's Gormenghast) or a much more thematically and emotionally rich and complicated realist story like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (comparable in a way to the giant fantasy epics with multi volumes). They'll pick an enormous space opera over Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
But these are all generalizations. Manifestations of autism can look and be wildly different.
Because then you’re not just having a chance to ‘play’ at social interactions - you’re playing under the watch of a caring mediator. The DM is going to clarify things, guide the discussions and dialogues, suggest options, correct misassumptions, etc. - in a way that almost no one ever would IRL.
Play-acting social interaction isn’t really any less nerve wracking to me than having a ‘real’ interaction, because to me all interactions are acting anyway as far as I’m concerned. There isn’t any fundamental difference in terms of energy expended - unless someone else, e.g. the DM, is there to shoulder some of that workload. Then it’s a little easier, a little lower stakes.
I suspect this is a point that is often under-appreciated. I don’t have much else to add but it really can’t be overstated how accurate this is. Just wanted to highlight the statement since I think it expresses the idea well.
This is a nice study but not one to extrapolate anything from.
You don't have the "what am I supposed to say now??" panic, and you don't have to understand an unfamiliar social situation.
I think that you do not generally need game mechanical traits in your character sheet to do this; you can write it in a spare section if you want to do (it is useful to have spare sections for this and other purposes; I will often want to add many extra notes that there are not pre-defined sections for).
In GURPS, you would generally represent some of such things with mental disadvantages and quirks. I prefer to not use mental disadvantages unless I specifically want the game effects of those disadvantages (e.g. if you are unlucky, or cursed, or take only half as many turns as other characters, or you will tell the truth half of the time that you do not intend to do so, etc), and would generally rather have a choice, even if my character's personality is supposed to be something, I can do it by myself instead of making the game to try to do it for me. I do usually add quirks though, and I do more often want physical and social disadvantages.
The true observation is more like “untrained people have a better intuition for the behaviour of people who think like them”. When the researchers are all allistic, and the experiments are all based on allistic psychology, the researchers find that autistic people “don't understand other people” – but that's experimental error.
I expect we'll be stuck with this ToM myth for a while, like we're stuck with Sigmund Freud's nonsense. (I mean, “Oedipus complex”, seriously? We have empirical evidence for the Westermarck effect!) But that doesn't make it true.
• Allistic people have difficulty recognising the internal states of autistic people; and
• Autistic people have considerably less difficulty recognising the internal states of autistic people (even though there are fewer autistic people from which to learn that skill).
It's placing "blame" on autistic people for what's actually an emergent phenomenon of neurodiverse groups. See doi:10.1177/1362361320919286 "Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective", and follow up on any sentences that strike your fancy until you have an opinion.
"Autistic people are more comfortable playing D&D than in natural social interactions", which is well known.
A small part was that some people "bleed" personality from their fantasy persona to their real persona.
You can do that in D&D, but you can also do that with any kind of self-talk / persona building / masking, which non-autists also do. Actors in movies and plays do it too.
Due to this, they get less chances to practice social interaction, something they were somewhat worse at in the first place, and fall even further behind on these skills.
DnD allows them to practice these skills, such as high-stakes social conflict, bargaining, and just plain old getting along, in a relatively safe environment.
Anyone with problems in social communication could make use of it as a great resource.
Seminar on "Dungeons and Dragons Group Therapy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PwP8Jhkl3w
Old Sierra Online games helped me learn some social skills and how to deal with life.
I'm not super up to date yet, but is there an actual 'science' based test (blood, dna, something other than observing behaviors). I've seen the diagnosis of l1, l2 and l3 autism, but this isn't cited by the paper (or at least wasn't in my skim).
The paper does indicate that imagination, social interactions and community are benefits from D&D. These benefits aren't specific to autistic people though; all growing kids can benefit from these types of activities and they're challenges that neurotypical kids encounter as well.
* Being unable to complete a character sheet unless someone walked them through it and made every decision for them
* Being unable to come up with character background
* Not being able to communicate if they were coming to a game or not
* Being 30-40 mins late without communicating
* Walking around, playing on their phone
* Demanding handwritten journals / game tracking because the sounds of typing ruined the immersion for them
* Constantly having to remind them of rules from session 0, such as 'no alcohol before or during the game'
* Extreme arguing over dice rolls
* Projecting their trauma onto many character and DM interactions
* Showing up with real-life gifts for the DM, expecting in-game rewards
Most recently, I lasted 12 sessions of 4-6 hours each before I cancelled the game. It killed my joy and I haven't DM'd since. It's been years now.
Typing that out made feel sad.
Not everyone who wants to do a thing can or should do the thing.
The last session I tried a year or so ago, and had the same person fanfic-writer attempting to demand control for everyone in the party because he “was the better tactician” because he “played Fire Emblem before”. My players ignored him and he got upset, and I had another player leave for unrelated reasons (D&D just wasn’t their thing, which I understood).
Now he’s been “trying” to make his own campaign, so he can get the control he desires from running the monsters, but that’s been somehow slower than his other projects.
Typing this out made me sad too, I haven’t been able to DM properly for a while.
I am going to say the terribly unfashionable, nay almost heretical for today's climate.
I am fairly convinced vast majority of self-described medical conditions, are not. I believe they are "trendy diagnosis" or "fad syndrome".
Certain medical conditions receive heightened attention in media, leading to increased self-diagnosis or people claiming to have the condition because it's seen as socially or culturally relevant.
Anyone recall the rash of Tourette syndrome TikTokers after an individual with the syndrome posted a highly viewed clip?
e.g., ADHD, Gluten Sensitivity, Chronic Lyme Disease, Fibromyalgia, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), and Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.
If I were going to run a game it would be a second-generation or later game like Toon or Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu which were all designed by people who played D&D and recognized what was wrong with D&D and the culture around it.
To be fair newer versions of the game fix some of the brokenness such as too many kinds of dice (you think it is fun until you realize that unless you buy 20x as many dice as you need you're going to always be looking around on the floor the right dice, and there's nothing dramatic about rolling 20d6 for a dragon's attack because it's always going to do about 60 points of damage, etc.)
Second-generation games give you everything you need to start in a single book (even a scenario) whereas with D&D you need to buy several books just to get started.
The long-term character progression works OK in a group of committed players but it makes the stakes so high that players take it so seriously so it is not a lot of fun for the DM. In a shorter, simpler game with higher character mortality you can give the guy who came in 30-40 min late a preroll, a minute of instruction, and some pretense for why they are late and it's NP.
I am not going to say it is the high point of DMing because it isn't but if I want to run a Paranoia game in a hurry I can kill off most of their clones before they get to the briefing room in my very dangerous Alpha complex with little-more-than random encounters and have them rolling on the floor laughing and coming back for more. Prerolls are probably more important preparation than an actual scenario because if people aren't fluent with character creation they're going to ruin it for each other (e.g. if you are creating new characters you want to have 1-1 sessions with players and not do it in a group... In D&D in particular you could spend years with a character and there is no way you want to rush the process, if I really wanted to do a D&D activity with young people I might just have them do nothing but create characters so they can get fluent)
Unfortunately the same way that "autism" and pill-seeking behavior have crowded out awareness of other neurodivergences, developmental disabilities and mental health conditions, D&D has crowded out awareness of other tabletop RPG's so you will never see some study where people find 5 out of 75 depressed people had fun playing D&D and 62 out of 75 depressed people had fun playing Toon.
That sounds like the most boring DnD session ever, we get so high that any underlying condition is masked by having a damn good time. ;)
Similarly, I'm aware some people cannot behave or function on other drugs such as alcohol (same for me). I wouldn't say others aren't allowed to drink but I don't want to smell cigarettes or cannabis. Smelling alcohol does nothing to me (obviously?)
So it boils down to constructing a social agreement based on consensus. Something which works for everyone. Which is more difficult the more people on the spectrum are there, and the less flexible other players are regarding their quirks.
So if the consensus is sober, be sober or don't join the team. Quite a simple concept. What happens here is that boundaries aren't respected (common with people on the spectrum). Explain the issue and (possible) consequences.
I'm glad that works for you, but I've both tried playing D&D while high, and had some players who'd get high, and it was not particularly pleasant. In my experience, D&D requires more clarity of mind than marijuana tends to leave you with.
And I say this as someone who's going to start drinking less during D&D games, because I've noticed that after my third beer, my DMing is not as good as it is after my first beer.
We used to play various table-top role-playing games over 20 years ago. D&D is known for its totally humiliatingly complex character creation, which is usually totally unnecessary, especially when ‘learning’ new players.
Edit: sorry for my confused mind; I meant DSA not D&D.
Character background is also not that important in my opinion. You simply explain that the goal is to play a role and that the character's background is important and determines his actions. Demanding that everything is well thought out increases the barrier to entry immensely. So keep it simple.
I remember my first ~~D&D~~ (Edit: DSA) sessions with new groups where it literally took us 5 hours to get all the characters ready.
Our group, after years of experience, simply explained the world to new players (we preferred to play World of Darkness, or shadowrun). We asked them what they wanted to play and roughly decided together with them what their strengths and weaknesses were. Rolling dice was more of a show for the newcomers, we hardly ever rolled dice ourselves. If you had 9/10 points in physical strength, we didn't think you needed to roll if you hit someone in the face. That just hurt.
Our rounds became more and more enjoyable over time. Fewer rules, fewer dice orgies. More common sense. More focussed on each other and on the game itself. At the very end, we even played without a game master. Often ancestor rounds in world of darkness (vampires that were several hundred years old. Something like demigods.) Dice rolling was more or less obsolete. We had night-long in-charachter conversations.
Oh, I miss that very much.
I have autistic traits and it definitely helped me to put myself in other people's shoes. But it helped me even more to overcome my speech disorder and to learn how to deal with it (stuttering).
It's not wildly simple, either -- D&D is squarely "rules medium" and there are plenty of RPGs with simpler chargen. But it's not notably hard for its space.
20 years ago there was more manual calculation of numbers on a character sheet, that now is likely to be handled by a digital sheet
In my opinion, character creation in shadowrun is relatively simple, if a little time-consuming. In WoD character creation takes 10 to 30 minutes max, even for a complete beginner.
Had to do that as "homework" before my first D&D session long ago, and it was indeed a long process, but that actually made it very exciting for me and made me invested in the character from the start!