Game Coder & Autism Parent

Greets all. I’m an Autism Parent and a long time old school Game Master, writer and coder. Reading and writing is a great way to open up the minds of children and adults allowing them to better express themselves as a knight, warrior, etc. I wrote this awhile ago about how role-playing opens a whole new world in being able to write and socialize. The content is still very relevant. Maybe you know someone on the spectrum or their parent(s) who can benefit: bordeglobal.com/foruminv/in … pic=322640

Hi GameMaster, thanks for sharing! I think this content is relevant for parents in general, as one myself I always appreciate things like this. IF is great for kids imaginations, spelling, reading, the whole thing, you can physically see them growing as they play the games. Great!

Adam

Thanks Adam_S, have you gotten your children into RPGs?

I’m still in the foothills of learning IF. Do you find much activity with school age players?

Fos1, that is interesting, if you acquire experience from putting it to the test please update the thread since you are already there,

We have the Action Castle and Action Castle II games which we’ve played, I introduced some D&D style dice stuff which they loved, and they also like some IF games but at 6 & 7 they tend to just have fun seeing what daft things the parser will accept; so Lost Pig is a great game for this and I also code up (in Z-Code) some home-made games that cater for that. :slight_smile:

My experience is that they won’t actively seek it out, at least not at first and game apps on Android will likely always win out the majority of times, however once it’s there in front of them they have a great time. My kids for example are 6 & 7, they love Lost Pig but mostly at the moment it’s experimentation with what Grunk will respond to i.e take off pants, throw pants at pig etc.

It’s interesting. There’s 7 years between me and my brothers so to some extent I was an “only child” for the most part of my ‘kiddie’ life; as a result (and probably coupled with the technology of the day in the UK) I wasn’t anywhere near as animated and energetic as my own children are, I was quite happy at age 7-8 to calmly play chess, play text adventure games and also program my own in Basic on my Plus 4. In today’s world for the kids there is so much choice, availability and speed of obtaining the apps with the flashy graphics and animation.

But, as many people have commented, text is timeless, and in the right conditions they get just as much fun mucking about with the parser as anything else.

Adam.

I find that this is something you need to introduce when they are young like pre-teens when their imagination is starting to kick in like never before.