Show HN: Autism Simulator

Also, everyone has to mask at work.

Its a bit of a misnomer.

Skipping breakfast reduces the caloric energy you have. Eating a full breakfast is basically going against your instinct. Optimal thing for autistic people would be a energy bar that is both healthy, has good texture, and makes you feel full.

I was surprised to find that skipping my medication which causes drowsiness instantly caused my energy to crash to zero and lose the game. I think this is well intentioned but weirdly designed.

Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.

Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.

Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.

That is a problem. For who is it created exactly?

Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.

There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.

If there was a fund to help remove sprints, scrum, Jira and standups I would donate to it.

It's like a factory but the people are the machines.

Probably many of the people who hate writing code for a PM at work, love working on their own open source project.

And the difference is freedom.

My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if they are real? Except when they're not?

That, on its own, would make it clear the environment wasn't built for me.

The fact that the environment was very obviously built for management—for information to flow up so that decisions can flow down—but also that nobody is willing to acknowledge that? That just makes it even clearer.

I've worked in an environment that did feel like it was built for me, and it was pretty much the opposite of scrum/agile/etc. I had real trust with a clearly defined area of ownership. I was responsible for managing the interfaces and interaction points around my area and, occasionally, for real deadlines (with real context!), not a slog of fake short-term deadlines that exist just to create pressure. I didn't have to break down or justify my work in terms of bite-sized tasks that could roll up into somebody's spreadsheet.

And the best part? We got more done, faster, than conventionally managed teams.

If the culture hadn't been totally ruined by a reorg, I'd still be there. I'm still sad I haven't been able to find anything similar since. But, having experience that, I am only more confident that scrum et al are absolutely not built for me.

I agree with this

In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.

Unfortunately the principles are rarely adhered to.

It’s built to make upper management happy with the facade of productivity, middle management employed, while they squeeze the most out of the workforce and keep up the constant pressure (endless sprints).

It’s not built for the product team (devs, designers, QA).

In some cases, coincidentally, it might be good for some neurodivergent folks, I guess…

…as long as they don’t mind the constant bugging for updates, interruptions, and constant pressure… I’m sure it’s an environment where people with ADHD etc shine.

In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.

No, it’s the opposite. Daily performance check-ins are exhausting and humiliating. The cops show up at your house every day with guns drawn.

A trap autistic people fall into is believing things will get better if a metric is imposed. “Oh, now I just have to beat the metric, not worry about being well-liked.” No, now you have to do both. New written rulers don’t make the shitty unwritten ones go away. It just became monotonically easier to get fired and monotonically harder to get promoted.

When management imposes a metric or quota, it’s time to get a union. Unfortunately, this is not something we have the skills to do alone, but it is a way to fight back against those who hate us.

Hard disagree.

It's there to help management control the 'au-dhd' crowd with a manufactured focus that rarely aligns with what they could naturally focus on.

No, just no.

As someone with ADHD, I am orders of magnitude more productive when I do freelancing than in an SCRUM based corporate environment and much happier. And I mean orders of magnitude, I am not being dramatic. (Though that only works if I work on something I am interested in otherwise my lows are even lower.)

Task switching is a typical issue for both ADHD as autism people and SCRUM has so much. Just the damn dailies are complete murder for my mental health and productivity.

The problem with SCRUM is that it focuses on everyone being a cog in the machine. Everyone replaceable. At best it allows teams to self-organize (in theory, seldom in practice) but does not acknowledge individual needs of team members.

Whenever you are forced to be around people, you are forced to put on your mask and perform. Exhausting.

I've gotten much farther in life by masking it to some extent. Those gains in life allowed me more freedom overall and let me do more of what I enjoy.

"Just be yourself" is a good message in a movie, but everyone has to play a role to some extent to get where they want to be.

For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.

I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.

I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.

IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.

I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.

Masking is hell, I agree. But the person you are underneath isn't guaranteed to be something that people like to be around either.

> If you're autistic, don't mask

I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.

But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.

This is a really privileged perspective. Most people have to be professional abuse takers if they want to make rent.

I do agree that “masking is bad” is sometimes taken too far. It doesn’t justify being harmful to other people. But the chronic toxic positivity that workplaces demand, because people want to delude themselves into believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival, is exhausting and unsustainable for autistic people.

> You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine.

Some of those people sign my paycheck though.

That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.

I will share the source code in a few days once it's cleaner. It'd be relatively easy to fork it and plug a new story into the code :)

I am not autistic in any way afaik, but "tiny hotdesking" sounds like a torture come up in the seventh circle of hell.

> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.

No company is supportive of neurodivergence, if it actually causes a difference. They are supportive if your issue is you need to wear noise cancelling headphones, and they can put your photo on the careers page about how they support neurodivergence.

> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.

It's easy to mouth slogans, and modern companies employ teams of specialists in that department. You can't trust their words, which should be assumed to be lies, only their actions (especially their actions when they're under some pressure).

Here's an absurdly clear example: I recently listened to these podcasts about Saudi Arabia's Neom project. It is hyper-dysfunctional and was run by a guy who literally bragged about treating his subordinates as slaves trying to work them to death. But all the responses from the project are pitch-perfect corporate "we value our employees," "we follow best practices," etc.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-1-skiing-in...

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-2-the-emper...

TIL misophonia.

I’ve realised in recent years that I’m quite far on the spectrum. Very obvious when I was young but am exceptionally good at masking now so most people don’t realise.

Nowadays I experience misophonia in “attacks” that just come on. Recently I was on public transport and the noise was suddenly so unbearable that I had to get the hell out of there, hadn’t really felt like that since I was a kid. Fight or flight feeling. When I was a kid I had a lot of hearing tests as a result, ASD was not on anyone’s radar.

Didn’t realise this had a name.

Agree. The idea that autististics rely on a large box of daily pills is insane. -chugs coffee

I believe the medication here is for ADHD, given there's a "special event" at one point.

I don't really relate to a lot of it, it's mostly a crude caricature of my experience, though it's still funny.

The only medication I know about that some people on the spectrum take are antipsychotics and that's for specific situations, but maybe if you're in that situation life seems even more like a dystopian text based adventure game.

It definitely feels like it.

It has lost meaning for me as a normie. It’s the same thing with the word “depressed” .

When I was in school in the ‘90s hardly anyone identified as such. These days, when I talk to my kid, and she tells me that so many people claim to be on the spectrum even though they seem ordinary.

It’s hard to know what it means since it’s so broad.

Unfortunately being normal doesn't sell books, courses, consulting. Doesn't work well as a sales funnel.

I had this exact thought the other day when I was in a convo with my wife about autism.

Thanks for saying this. My sister was autistic, like, back in the 90s autistic, and it’s driving me insane to see this game passed off as some well thought out simulation. The scoring algorithm itself tells the story, literally everything is masking. This can be spun in a “enlightening” manner but it’s just not.

This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life".

There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.

These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.

The normal simulator is the negative space in this game. The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.

I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.

While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.

I don’t think it would be possible, as a lot of what ASD people process consciously is processed subconsciously by neurotypical people (which contributes greatly to ASD burnout).

Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.

What's 'normal' for me is pretty much the same thing, but without the intense reactions to the light and sound stimuli. And the rest generally toned down.

Imagine having basically infinite social energy and no situation where you'd tend to react super negatively to socialization itself. But most things extra are very boring and you only live for things not related to your work.

Or that's how I imagine it at least

The burn out due to unproductive meetings would probably be at a similar scale

Modify all the social interactions that subtract energy and instead have them add energy.

Thank you I was quite proud of it. The popup topics are from various special interests of mine :)

It's a valid frustation... sadly the social bits are often useful.

E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person

The social bits are how most people build A and B

let's put a pin in that, circle back

I agree, which is why it drives me crazy to be on HN and see people be like "if you want to work as a programmer you must live breathe eat sleep code and have a resume of Github commits three miles long."

It's a job, not a religion.

Had a "people" guy at a previous employer. At every corporate social thing, he'd run around with his huge DSLR camera and take pictures to post on the company social media, to show how this is a great place to work.

He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.

> Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.

Thank you. Neovim has radicalized my design sensibilities and I really miss the internet I used in the 90s as a kid.

> I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?

I got a chuckle out of this because it's how I felt IRL for a long time. Especially "every option I choose seems to lower that stat" This is a good rundown https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/behavio...

No cheatsheet but I'll opensource the code in a few days when i clean it up a bit

Masking is just acting in a way that you normally wouldn't, but have to. Think of a spy blending in avoiding to get caught, it's a conscious effort not to screw up and it takes more energy/willpower from you than not having to pretend to be someone else. I guess it gets harder the more different from yourself you have to act, like having an itch you can't scratch or will get "punished" somehow, damn.

Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors. It's not even necessarily conscious but it takes a large toll on mental energy. Besides the energy required for the masking itself there's the compounding effect of setting unrealistic expectations in others. The better someone is at masking the more is expected of them which creates an even larger drain on mental energy.

Hahaha good catch will patch this.

I think this clip of Man of Steel did a very good job of showing how Autistic people get bombarded with sensory information. There are comments under the video claiming that this mirrors their experience.

Man of Steel - The World's Too Big, Mom

https://youtu.be/VcdFURryKjA

Zack Snyder described perfectly the ADHD/ Autistic experience growing up in one single scene. Intentionally or not. This movie made me feel less alone in this world. Superman helped me realize that wasn't a freak. I just perceived the world differently. Thank you Zack. I will forever be grateful for Man of Steel for many years to come

> As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.

Compounding this issue is the fact that people often refuse to accept that a mental thing is actually a physiological thing, albeit harder to fix because it’s currently poorly understood. People’s mental models of brain-related conditions often create a separation of the person from their physical self, either due to some subconscious or conscious belief in a metaphysical representation of the condition.

It's extra fun when you manage to get positive feedback from colleagues and hit all your concrete performance expectations, but then at review time you still get poor marks because it's a stack ranking system, so, as far as your manager is concerned, there was never a realistic option to give one of the limited supply of good scores to you instead of one of the people who have enough spoons left at the end of the work day to permit some enthusiasm for the quarterly optional-but-actually-mandatory after-hours team Whirlyball outing.

@giantg2 dude I feel you. I've never disclosed but I've heard about people being retaliated against for doing so over the years.

I wish I could have added this story knot. I'll open source it soon and you'll see how crufty dealing with inkle is https://www.inklestudios.com/ in JS. Credit to the folks working on inkle but something like this is pushing the tech beyond what it says on the tin.

Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.

I got diagnosed with aspergers. Never got past the fact the entire world treated me like a burger. Felt so burned i feel like I can never have a normal life like I did before the diagnosis.

Feels like my life is worthless and if complain to anybody they will just throw me in jail or the hospital again. Like I'm trapped in hell and unable to ever be normal.

All I pray for everyday is to find a partner who lets me have some sense of justice against the ones who caused this.

I feel like Apple is to blame and if I'm being honest until they comply with my every wish I'm never going to not be able to not be a homicide victim.

The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.

There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.

There's no medication for autism, nor there really is supposed to be any.

Autism is a super diverse condition so varies pretty wildly person-to-person.

People are touting Leucavorin. (It doesn't work) There are a lot of different things people have tried.

Xanax, Zolpidem, Belsomra, and a fifth of your favorite.

A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.

Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).

I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-

“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”

Do you view autism as a pathology or a difference?

Now I'm wondering how far on the spectrum Robert Moses was.

We might be best friends.

Pretty big. The key word is "comorbidity"; having one of them means you are more likely to have the other than a random person.

There's also an overlap in traits.

I'm AuDHD (autism + ADHD). You can read about my ADHD side if the experience (with memes!) here:

https://romankogan.net/adhd

It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.

It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.

It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.

(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)

To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.

> how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?

The lack of executive function is overlapping, but this particular post might be more of an ADHD simulator.

The very first "Follow the morning routine" or not is where this veers off my experience of the spectrum.

"Changing plans because of situations internal or external" is hard.

The option should've been "Spend 20 minutes making eggs again, because the yolks weren't the right kind of runny", miss the train, take a cab to work, but tell the driver that you've now got a system for eggs which you didn't have today (yeah, fun fact, the recipe was off because they don't refrigerate them over in France).

There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.

The diagnostic criteria and symptoms have substantial overlap, ultimately everything in the DSM is a descriptive diagnosis not based on a mechanistic understanding of neurobiology so it's VERY likely that our categories don't map 1:1 to the underlying causes.

One is impulsive, the other requires structure. The two are not mutually exclusive though, because both conditions are pretty diverse. AuDHD is a term used to describe people with both.

I've seen Twitter use "AuDHD" for the intersection. It's big enough to have its own label and subgroup who identify with it.

Not at all - the stat I've heard is that 30-50% of autistics also have ADHD

Significant enough that the DSM-iV recognized ADHD symptoms as symptoms of autism and didn't allow a comorbid diagnosis of both conditions because of this. (The DSM-V does recognize both as possibly occurring together.)

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Thank you! Hot desking is a nightmare regardless of if you're on the spectrum or now.

I must have vaguely remembered it. I knew I had seen this idea before with some other thing but couldn't place it. What was the controversy?

Maybe if you're very careful but probably not.

There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.

The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.

Great question - been hoping people reply to this comment with resources.

I mean they say it's a spectrum.

Thank you so much!

Moderate consumption of coffee is fine. I'm not aware of any severe damage from drinking a cup a day. I don't think the comparison with alcohol is apt.

I paid the price. I still haven't received the intelligence.

I dare say autism is the pride of human intelligence.

Or this could be another cope

Anything but admitting environmental effects of pollution, plastics, and over medicating.

> who fires an employee for falling asleep once?

Happened to my grandfather even though he was probably the best damned cab driver in all of Michigan.

Bummer - this has been the hardest code I've ever had to write test coverage for. I'm using https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ for the story routing with inkjs so I'm not surprised that there are some lingering weird-paths.

> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?

Masking is not always conscious, in fact it's largely unconscious. So many autistic people will go through their day around neurotypical people and feel burnt out by lunch and have no idea why. They don't necessarily realize they're burning tons of mental effort just talking to people or dealing with stimuli.

Autistic people learn to mask just to get by day to day. It's not like they got issued a "How to be Autistic: Masking for Success" guide book when they were born.

Heck, this isn’t even specific to software engineering. It’s basically just a “getting through the workday” simulator. I think there are a great many people who find working in an office exhausting. Personally, I was so much happier once I switched to remote work.

> It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.

You might as well be telling a wheelchair-bound person that it's their responsibility to find a way up a flight of stairs or maneuver a cramped bathroom stall.

The reason it's called a "spectrum" is that everyone's on it. :)

The definition of autism has changed to pull in masses more people over the years, so if you're an older software engineer you may be autistic using the up-to-date definition.

Based hidden burnout scenario

It's a default Neovim theme: murphy

You are most definitely not alone! There's many of us.

https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/physica...

"I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face" ― Franz Kafka

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" - Oscar Wilde

It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.

It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.

I'm on HN pretty regularly so, in a sense, yes

I see u

People are tired of being forced to do bullshit meaningless or net negative stuff, obey people they don't respect on a deeper level etc. People live in a way like captive animals in a zoo. Everything is urgent, the sky is falling, but all behind a glass screen.

But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak and mental health. So everyone has ADHD, autism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, bipolar and more. When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine, ripped of context and roots, atomized, etc. But this is not valid vocabulary, we are modern people, we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts. Medical labels still have power even in a lifeless bureaucratic corporate HR hellscape. Medical diagnoses and credible claims of unsafe work environments. Anything else, they sleep. These two and they listen.

Maybe that's the point? I heavily dislike it when people put blinking stuff on websites.

Thanks for playing and agreed! I have a disclaimer in the [About] modal

Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.

Thats a bit uncalled for. This is a game made by someone shaped by their perspective on the world. It can be appreciated as such without applying your own additional intent.

I think masking is pretty general across the board. Even severe Autism. My daughter acts completely different in different contexts. Some could say we all do but you'll know it when you see it esp when the mask is gone.

Thank you :) My book is available on Amazon. Not sure if I'm allowed to directly link in comments but search "ex nihilo simmons"

genuinely unhinged take