Imaginitive play

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I've been looking into this recently because of reading about autism/AS an lack of imaginitive play.
The thing is i was a really imaginative child and have become a really imaginitive adult. I spent a lot of time with my special interests, reading and writing and stories. Again unlike lots of things i've read about AS i prefer fiction to non fiction, because i like stories, though i read almost exclusivly sci fi, fantasy, crime and for a while romance, all genre stuff which usually follow recognisable set rules.
Anyway, i also played imaginative games, with one or two friends. I would pretend to be a dog, horse or cat, or we would be fairies looking for treasure, things like that....however i never played symbolically ie: i never played tea parties, mums and dads, doctors and nurses or any games which related to the 'real world'.
And i would get really annoyed if people didn't play my imaginitive games right, i would only play the games i wanted and would walk away if people tried to get me to play anything else.
So you see, while i engaged in imaginitive play it was very ego centric, centred on my own interests and i was also very happy playing with myself.
what about anyone else??

Same here - I prefer science fiction and horror to non-fiction, and, generally, older fiction to modern (I like the way the language was used in the past better, for some reason, the way things tend to be under-stated.)


And I also enjoyed imaginative play (although my choice of imaginative play was certainly always strange by my classmates' standards!)

Although, I believe I always preferred to build and make things - I enjoyed building forts and castles and that sort of thing much more than actually playing in them, although I certainly enjoyed imagining the things that could be done in them as I was building them. I would use building blocks and cardboard boxes and other things to build castles and cities that covered the entire floor of my room, or covered an entire full-story flight of stairs and part of the hallway above. Or, I'd use a half-dozen blankets draped over furniture to build tunnels and caves, and sit inside very still imagine the things that would live in the caves. Or I would dig huge sunken cities in sand or dirt for my toy soldiers (and later the Star Wars and G.I. Joe guys.)

I think my brother and sister actually enjoyed playing in these cities and things, but about 90% of the fun for me was in building them. I like to think this took a great deal of creativity and imagination, but perhaps that sort of hands-on building is the sort of thing that the shrinks are talking about when they say "unimaginative play"?





That reminds me, too, of how when I was about 8 or 9 years old, there were these two blankets at my grandmother's house that had these white strings that were very easy to pull out of the fabric and unravel. Left alone for a few hours, I pulled all the string out until the blankets fell to shreds, and tied the string in a huge, elaborate 3-dimensional spiderweb all around the room, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling as high as I could reach and find anything to tie it to, to furniture and doorframes and so on. And then I sat perfectly still, tuned everything else out, and stared at it and imagined what it would be like to live in a world of spiderwebs like that, traveling from string to string. I don't remember the walls or floor or ceiling or furniture or anything, just my mind and those strings drifting off as far as I could imagine into the distance.

My grandmother walked into the room to see what I had done, went totally ballistic as she made me "snap out of it" and try to realize what I'd done to her room! I didn't see or hear her until she started shaking me. I think she decided that I either did it because I was out of my mind, or to be cruel and disrespectful to her and her house, or perhaps a combination of the two, but in any case she was hysterical over it. I was vaguely upset because she was mad and screaming and swearing and crying, but mostly very, very sad and distressed because she was tearing the beautiful string spiderweb apart, with the appalling result that I couldn't imagine traveling along those strings to whatever empty infinities they might have pointed to anymore.

Yeah, well, as I said before: my version of imaginative play was definitely not to anyone else's taste.

Good point, I've never understood what they mean when they say "no imagination", I have lots of imagination, I imagine things in my head all day. When I was a child I mostly played with cowboys and indians, small toys, and one time I had this game I played for a hole year where I made a classroom for all my cowboys and indians where they went to school and one month was one year. They were all different characters with different personallities, some were friends, some were teachers favourit, some were good at sports. I was very sad when that game were over.

But I never understood why they say we don't have imagination, sure we do! Just like "no empathy" I have empathy, maybe a little differently but it matters just as much, like I let old ladies have my seat in the bus, and cry easily for other people. I can feel other peoples pain. It's a lack of understanding I suppose.

I like the game with the spiderweb, cool! But I feel for your grandmother.

I used to read a lot of science fiction and a little fantasy. I don't read for fun much now that I have to read so much for college.

When I was a kid I certain did engage in imaginative play, although I was usually alone. I made up an elaborate story about a city-state called "Toilland." It was the last city on Earth due to a nuclear war. It survived because it was in a huge dome (which happened to be my house). I had a lot of "action figures" that I used as the people of the city. There were good guys and bad ones. There was an evil supervillian named Brainium who lived on the other island (forgot to mention Toilland was on a Pacific island) in this 2 island chain. He was actual just a living brain. His minions were always attacking Toilland for some reason or other.

I don't remember much more about it, but the story was continuous for several years. It was like a television series with characters getting killed off and new ones arriving. Near the end of it, Brainium was defeated BUT the dome had been collapsed on the city. The survivors moved to the second island.

Oh, and it was called Toilland because toil means to work hard, and life in Toilland was hard with all the Brainium attacks and the street gangs and whatnot.

i never use to like playing the imagination game but i did use to spend hundreds of hours building the same things with lego, only refining the process.

i also once byilt a lego version of the base on hoth under my bed, i never played any missions with it, my fun was in building it and it being right and accurate.

I once spent a great deal of time with someone i knew in a long jump pit building littl tunnels and bridges. they were tunnels and stuff suposadly for cars but we never took cars or anything with which o ' play'

even now i do not play i learn...

^licks^

jammie

I do that a lot.

I find myself talking to people who I'll probably never see again.

I think they may see one characteristic in a certain set of children and then apply it across the board because (of course) all people on the spectrum are exactly alike (sarcasm). I had alot of imagination and would play extensive games, but I would do so quietly and by myself. I could amuse myself in other words - and I think that is a difficult concept for social NTs to underatsn perhaps. And if you are playing extensive games by yourself than that is further proof of some other sort of psychological disorder I'm sure (lol). My son is like me when he plays - he told me the other day that he was pretending he was in a TV show. I'm glad that he wanted to share that with me and I though that was defintely very imaginative. When my daughter was little on the other hand (she had a diagnosis of MR due to microcephaly) she would not play with alot of toys except to destroy them on occassion. However, I do not think it would be right to say that she did not have imaginitive play - because who knows what she was thinking. I know she was processing all this and was just delayed so she was just developing at a different rate and doing things differently. But this lack of imaginative play stuff doesn't really make sense even when the experts try and define it.

I too played a lot by myself, infact when i played with other children (no more then one or two) it was allways on my terms. ie: they wanted to join in with me and i let them...but only if they played the way i said!! ! I was a bit bossy i think.
A lot of my time was also spent alone, because of course my fantasy imaginings only really made sense to me!!

That's too personal a question for me to answer

Kidding aside, I guess I've got a pretty good imagination; sometimes I get really into it and disturb those around me.

I don't know how many times I've done that. I enjoy creating worlds, and really getting into the gritty details--so if I'm talking about how a succubus society would run, oftentimes people think of it as "too much information." Oh well, I'm putting most of that stuff into a book, so...hahah.

I read novels all the time. When I was little I wrote stories and engaged in a lot of imaginative play. Hell, I constructed whole imaginary worlds. I even- sometimes- played imaginatively with my mother and with other kids. So I don't know about the whole "aspies lack imagination" bit.

I used to do that all the time. I often created my own fantasy worlds, where I found myself at every possible opportunity. When confronted, I called it "having a rich imagination." My peers had a different name for it: "stupidity".

Wow!!
Seems that an Aspie thing maybe creating imaginary worlds. Maybe what we lack is play set in the real world....playing mums and dads, or teddy bear teaparties, or washing up and stuff, i think they call that symbolic play. It is true that no one i've met as a child was as into iamginary worlds as i was! And loads of you guys were.
Interesting!!

Yeah definitely: between "absence of imaginative play" and "lack of empathy", it sounds like somebody needs to slap a clue into the guys who write the official definitions!

I've had a wild imagination as a child, and I've used it in all avenues of my play. Who ever says that all children on the Spectrum lacks imagination needs a Reality Check. They see AS Children as Little Rain Men, and that's not how we were.

But apparantly AS imaginative play isn't real imaginative play at all, but copying and rote memory stuff. Thats what i read anyway.....though it would appear to be rubbish if this thread is any indication!! !