Gaming —

Auti-sim lets you experience the horror of sensory overload

Creator wants to help players gain empathy and understanding of autistic children.

Not pictured: Deafening shrieking.
Not pictured: Deafening shrieking.

You stand in a dirt field under a beautiful blue sky. A few meters away, a group of kids are shrieking and playing happily on a jungle gym. As you walk forward, though, you notice the kids are actually faceless statues, staring blankly back at you. Their shrieking gets almost deafeningly loud as you approach, layered on top of monotone schoolyard rhymes and songs. The idyllic visuals start to get fuzzy, too, like the world is caught between reality and the static on a dead analog TV station. Your only relief is to quickly retreat back to the safety of your starting place.

It might sound like a new horror game, but the experience above actually describes Auti-sim, a small but thought-provoking first-person indie game about hypersensitivity in autistic children. The game was recently created by a team of three during Vancouver's Hacking Health weekend hackathon. Besides being one of the creepiest indie "short subjects" you'll play this year, the game also gives players a brief glimpse into what it's like for the millions of autistic children suffering from sensory overload issues.

"I wasn't really aiming to simulate what hypersensitivity actually is," team lead Taylan Kadayifcioglu (who goes by Taylan Kay) told Ars. "My goal was to elicit the same kind of reaction from a neurotypical person. So the goal was basically to irritate the hell out of your senses."

Auti-sim gameplay sample.

Kay said the game was partly inspired by an excerpt from the documentary Inside Autism, which uses similar audio and video filters to convey the overwhelming experience of sensory overload. As the video's creator put it, "my brain loses its capability for cognition. It crashes like a computer." Kay said he "thought that it would be such a powerful experience from a first-person perspective and a good project to take on for a weekend."

But Kay said he was also driven by stories from his wife, a social worker who runs therapy groups for people with special needs and their families. "One of the groups is actually working with [neurotypical] siblings of kids with special needs," he said. "They have trouble understanding what their siblings are going through.... [they] feel neglected because their sibling is getting all the attention. In some cases the child might act out and target their sibling. The neurotypical siblings might not be able to understand what they did wrong to deserve it."

Feedback on the game has been "generally very positive," Kay said, with many people with autism thanking the team for creating a way to effectively communicate "exactly what it feels like for me." He also reported positive feedback from people who work with autistic children, who realize when playing the game that they are "displaying behaviors and reacting in ways that they have seen children in real life do."

One of the strongest reactions may have been from Krista Howarth, a special needs educator who served as "autism advisor" on the project. "She was saying that through all her training she'd never had an experience like this," Kay said. "So imagine you were trying to help people with an issue like this, but you have no idea what it feels like. I think in that way it's really powerful and helpful."

There has been some negative feedback too, including messages from some autistic people who said the game is nothing like their experience. Others have taken exception to such an abstract game with "sim" as part of its title. "Criticism is also good in that it creates conversation, and you can still learn something about your own condition, even if you have other experiences," Kay said. "It doesn't mean you know everything about autism just because you have it.... It's more of a statement on how bad it can be rather than how it is for everyone."

From the small demo built in a single weekend, Kay and his team will be developing Auti-sim into a full-fledged game. There will be more interaction, artificially intelligent characters, and new locations "like a classroom or a schoolbus or a mall." While the game is not for profit, Kay says he's looking for funding either from government agencies or other people and groups that "share our goal of raising awareness for autism-related difficulties."

Channel Ars Technica