There should be a social skills video game

Post Reply New Topic

While I love the concept, in my opinion, I only see it working under some (preferably all) of these conditions:

1. The game should be first person, or at least have a function that switches between first and third-person. For me, it's easy to observe a conversation because the cues are passing me by and are filtered by the people in question, whereas conversing with someone has the cues trying to reach my brain directly. A video game that does both would allow analysis *and* practice attempts.

2. The game should, without a doubt, have motion support controls. I was initially thinking of the Wii, but upon heavier thinking, Kinect for the 360 would be much closer, since your body is the controller and we do have to train to use our bodies when socializing.

3. The game should definitely come with a microphone (maybe specific to the game or USB) and/or have voice-recognition software/tone-of-voice coach built in. I can't speak on behalf of all Aspies, but, from my experience, lots of conversational missteps of mine have occurred not because of what I said, but how I said it. Most of the time I wasn't even aware of how it was coming across for it to have turned into a misstep in the first place, so having something like this would increases awareness levels of it.

4. While it's debatable whether or not a plot is necessary, there should be at least streamlined objectives and/or levels to go through. That way, the player can progress through the game and feel that their social skills are improving. Even a social skills "checklist" or "records" within the game would cover this well.

5. The game shouldn't have any cheats. At all. While, based on my anecdotal experience, there are multiple ways to process a skill that might be effortless for others, none of them were simply given by entering a "code" into your brain - same goes with this game.

6. I have played a few dating sim games, and there's one thing I can't help but notice one key element that was missing - reaction times! You're given as much time as you need to take the info given and process it, leading to near-correct answers all the time because of it (there's still room for error, but it's smaller). Except that for conversations IRL and/or in real time, you're only given a few second window to formulate a response. Maybe there could be a range of difficulty settings where the easiest setting could be a large amount of time (10secs?) and the hardest setting mimic the actual flow of conversation reaction times.

There are more ideas, but I think they might be best for another post.