Games Give Neurodiverse Kids Space to Examine Their Internal Lives and Behaviors
By Bill M.
A brief note on my background:
I’ve been making games and doing startups for 25 years and am neurodiverse, and we have also been raising a neurodiverse kid for over a decade. I was a trial lawyer before games but am NOT a trained therapist, but have spent a massive amount of time thinking about, observing, and studying social interaction in games like FarmVille, ROBLOX (technically a platform), Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and many others. These experiences have coalesced into my underlying reason for becoming involved in Outside the Box and ROBLOX Squad Builders:
I believe that the right game at the right moment can open doors to growth that no “serious conversation” ever could.
A huge part of my conviction is that we don’t ask players to talk about themselves in a first person sense with “I” statements. Instead, playing games lets kids talk about someone else’s feelings as a way to access and process their own internal life.
Talking About Your Feelings is Stressful
Neurodiverse players—Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, etc. —often spend a lot of their real-world energy on masking, managing, and just making it through the social demands of the day. Asking them, “So how do you feel about this?” can feel exhausting, scary and overwhelming. Thinking about their own compensatory methods is often even more unpleasant.
Games are the opposite- Defined structure, clear goals, formal social patterns and the sense of mastery are extremely appealing to many neurodiverse kids. Michelle’s blog entry talks about her insight over 30 years of the power of meeting kids where they are and her observation (as a non-gamer - sorry Michelle) of how games, particularly videogames, uniquely engage kids.
Talking About a Videogame Character’s Feelings is Hilarious (and therapeutic)
There are two core components:
Discussing what a character should do in-game and how that character feels lets neurodiverse kids engage without the emotional risk and complication of having to describe their own feelings.
Kids are already masters at learning strategies and approaches to beat games- extending this to real life behavior is intuitive.
Creating situations where a game character is the one experiencing sensory overload, executive function struggles, or rigid thinking patterns is natural. The kids we work with have helped us tune scenarios to be realistic, to incorporate challenges that come up, such as conflict during recess or around school tests. We can also inject humor to manage the emotional intensity and maintain perspective.
Kids observe in-game social situations and can comment:
“Oh, Alex gets stressed when the game throws too many objectives at once. They really need to focus on one thing at a time.”
What they may be telling us through the character is:
“I get stressed when life throws too many objectives at once. I need to focus on one thing at a time.”
But they can say it at a safe distance, without peeling off the armor they’ve spent years building.
Commenting from the Sidelines Still Counts
This isn’t avoidance—it’s scaffolding.
When we talk about a character’s coping mechanism in the third person, we get the emotional benefits of recognition and processing without the exposure risk of direct self-disclosure. For neurodiverse players, that’s a big deal.
And here’s the extra win: once they’ve practiced talking about a behavior pattern in someone else, the leap to “that’s kind of like me” becomes shorter. In some cases, they’ll make the leap themselves. In others, it’ll happen quietly, privately, without needing to announce it.
Using Games Helps Neurodiverse Kids Build on Mastery
From personal experience, it sucked to have major social problems with other kids growing up and to not understand why. I often felt stupid or ashamed about things going off the rails socially and I felt powerless to fix the situations. Some of these same problems reoccurred regularly in work settings, exacerbated by the MANY other neurodiverse folks I worked with. At Zynga, I used to joke that we would double output if they would just put Ritalin in the water fountains.
Compared to messy real life social interactions, games offer a sense of mastery in a much more concrete and predictable environment. You build skills and are the protagonist (or control the protagonist). Building on mastery is fun and feels great- hopefully everyone reading this can connect to building mastery in something.
Games don’t just let us be someone else—they let us try talking about ourselves without actually talking about ourselves and also connect with others over the same situation.
And for a lot of neurodiverse players, that can mean the difference between silence and self-discovery.
