Achievement unlocked: successfully ended a conversation instead of walking away! games for Aspergers

September 8, 2011 4:49 AM

How can I create a game that will give quest lines, experience, achievements, rewards for accomplishing social life skills?

I'm thinking about something modeled after Chore Wars but for a game-loving kid (or adults!) with Aspergers. Some kind of adventure game where you have to put social skills into practice (or conversation call and responses, not unlike the Monkey Island "you fight like a cow" insult puzzle) in order to solve puzzles would be good too. Are there specific programming languages that would be best for doing this? I'm fairly used to picking up a book and learning something from scratch, so I'm not concerned about this being a very long project, just curious where to start.

posted by Wuggie Norple to human relations (4 answers total)

As far as building the game goes, Flash might be the best choice unless you have the mad skills needed to make something much more complex. Of course this could be done with many different RPG game editors. I learned through editing a custom game of Fallout Tactics which could probably work for what you want but there are many more modern variants.

Otherwise, just assign importance to the skills and sketch it all out as far as levels, direction, and flow to make it interesting. If you are any bit creative, then designing the game should be a piece of cake.
posted by JJ86 at 6:33 AM on September 8, 2011

Would you consider designing it as an iPhone app? If so, you might want to look at AppMakr. I haven't personally used it, but from everything I've ready it's really very good.

As an aside, I think there would be a wider appeal for a game like this...I don't have Aspergers, but I do have social anxiety, and I would definitely use something like this.
posted by DulcineaX at 7:17 AM on September 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

If you're going to be serious about this, I would begin by thinking of the learning objectives before deciding on the best gameplay. One objective seems to be "User will learn to hold a comfortable conversation' which is made up of a ladder of tasks that get to that goal.

Answering the question you asked:
Look into some "gamification" examples like Health Month and 4Square that seek to digitally reward real-world behavior.
Also there are several (very expensive) online programs that assign missions to help people do things like Network better. See Keith Ferazzi's Greenlight.
posted by jander03 at 10:45 AM on September 8, 2011

RPG Maker (oriented towards RPGs)

Game Maker (more general game dev platform)
posted by SuperSquirrel at 11:13 AM on September 8, 2011