asperger kids have a lack of imaginitive play

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I don't agree that aspies are unimaginative either. In fact, I think the situation is actually quite the contrary. I think aspies have gained this reputation because we're usually not imaginative in social situations.

The only aspie joke I've ever heard should illustrate my point: The boss was congratulating his aspie employee on an excellent job because of his ability to think outside the box. The aspie employee looks at his boss, and says, "What box?"

I'll go one step further: I think a great many of the latest and greatest developments come from aspies, with the Internet being a good example. I think the reason for this is that since we don't understand that box, we can think the unthinkable--where many of the best new ideas come from.

An aspie's greatest strength (and weakness) is to be able to think about the unthinkable innocently, and hence freely. It makes us very unimaginative in social situations, but we have the potential to be incredibly imaginative with respect to ideas in our special interests. We don't have to worry about that box.

I remember stacking the deck one time for Candy Land so that my mom would only take one space forward and I would leap to the very next candy spot on the board. She accused me of cheating and I completely denied it, of course I was also about 4-5 years old at the time. I also recall when I was slightly older "solving" the Rubik's cube by removing all the colored stickers and replacing them just perfectly so that no one could tell how I had done it. Pretty soon I told mom how I did it and she praised me for being able to think out of the box (i.e. creatively and imaginatively). I also one time took the Rubik's cube apart and pieced it back together correctly. The funny part about that was that I wasn't trying to solve it - I was trying to see how the pieces worked, and it didn't feel right piecing it back together without the pieces being in order.

Those are all non-socially acceptable ways of playing games, but no one can possibly say they are not creative ways of playing.

I believe the descriptions of "lack of imaginative play" refer to lack of social imagination. I know I had with toys, but I didn't really have them do things, although I might imagine things related to them. Seeing children play with toys as if they're independent entities with their own thoughts and personalities gets me, as that's something I never really did. My really imaginative "play" was more often daydreaming. I would daydream myself into my favorite stories, or use pictures as reference and imagine being in that picture and interacting with the world therein. It's probably no surprise that Through the Looking Glass was possibly my favorite book ever as a child, with the Chronicles of Narnia coming in very closely behind.

I liked having toys, though. I had so many kinds. I think I remained interested in toys well into my teens, to the point that it may have been suggested that I should move on with my interests (ha!). I think I was 15 or 16 the last time I got actual stuffed animals for Christmas.

This topic has just sparked all kinds of memories for me. This is great!

Here's another example:
I liked to play outside in the front of my parents' house when I was younger. Whenever a car was coming down the road I would sneak off (slowly, because that's what the unicorn told Schmendrick to do when hiding away from the harpy in The Last Unicorn), and hide so that they couldn't get a line of forward sight on me as they drove past. I would imagine they were bad guys trying to find me, like gangsters that were going to shoot me in a drive by if they saw me, or government agents looking for me. Now, I was perfectly aware that this was imaginary, so it's not like I had any actual issues with persecution or psycho-schizophrenia - I knew they were people that most likely lived in the neighborhood and were just driving down the street and didn't give two hoots about me. It still didn't change the increased heart beat that I had hoping I wouldn't get "seen" by them. The Ken/Barbie or student/teacher imaginative play in which my friends kept trying to get me to participate had NOTHING on the emotional high I got from playing this game with the cars as they came down the road.

When I was younger (And still do) I had a awesome imagination, I have several different alter egos in my mind. I just wish I could live one of them in real life to see what its like to be a NT.

By the standards of people with no imagination, sure Aspies lack in that area.

My 6 yo Aspie has never really played like other children from the time he was a toddler until now. He really just does not play. However, sometimes he will make up a scenario like "okay, Mom, let's pretend we are going on a road trip"---- or it is usually something imaginary revolving around cars (his special interest). Even as much as he loves cars, he never really even plays with his toy cars. But he knows which ones he has, and heaven forbid if I ever get rid of one.

I daydreamed just as much as a kid as I do as an adult (that is to say, a whole f*****g lot) but I rarely played with toys. I had them, but I didn't really play with them. Pretending was boring.

The trait is a lack of "imaginative" play, not lacking imagination why playing.

"Imaginative" play is thinking inside the box and pretending that you are doing normal things while playing toys and other children.

I spent my childhood daydreaming (or not, if you believe what the media says), I do not lack imagination.

Who says this? I defidentally was one of the most imaginative kids out there.

I think this summarizes it very well.

I had a great deal of imagination when I played with my toys as a child. I used my imagination a lot. I'd act out scenes from my favourite TV shows and make space stations with my Lego.

I notice a big difference in this area between my 6 year son who I think is an Aspie, and my 17 month old daughter who I think is very NT. They both engage in imaginative play, but my daughter does it differently. For her, anything square or rectangular is a phone. When my son was little, only a phone was a phone. He pretended to talk on the phone, but not on a lego or on a game piece like my daughter does. My daughter also will play with her dolls and stuffed animals in scenarios that we have done with her. She will kiss them, feed them, scold them, etc. My son never related what we did to him to others or to toys. My daughter will make food in her play kitchen and will feed herself, her dolls, or us. My son would make food in the play kitchen and feed himself, but had to be coached to feed his dolls, and would only offer us plates of food at an older age but would never put the spoon or cup up to our mouth the way our daughter does at only 17 months. My daughter walks toy animals or dolls around, I don't recall my son ever doing that. He lined them up instead. Now he plays with his Star Wars guys but I often hear him acting out similar scenarios from the movies with them. Or he builds lego robots and then refuses to ever take them apart. Or he plays with marble works and then gets upset if we ever want to take it apart and rebuild it. He will play imaginative games with his dad, but he dictates several rules to him and makes every game really unpleasant by all the rules that are impossible to follow. He will play with robots or cars or something and make them talk to each other though, so there is some imaginative play going on now. I doubt it is typical though because it has taken a long time for him to get there and my daughter is already doing things he has never done in that area.

It's not that imagination isn't there, it's just not expressed in the way it is among NT children.

That first example is quite telling. Regarding rules for games, even to this day (I'm 35) I still insist on always reading the rules before playing a game and then making sure everyone follows the rules during play. I've learned how to bend the rules a little over time, like if we're trying to hurry up and finish an especially long game, we'll come up with our own cheat rules near the end. My friends are trying to get me more involved in RPGs, which involves pre-set rules for actions that everyone has to follow. It's apprehensive for me because 1)I have to act as another character, and 2)I have to participate with other players, but the rules system helps and I enjoy the story that unfolds. I find that I spend more time saying yes my character would have done that because of these character traits, or no she wouldn't, but when it's time for me as a player to figure out what her next actions are going to be, it's a bit difficult for me to creatively come up with my character's next lines or next actions.

As per Lorna Wing (who describes the label "AS" that we have today):