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[Ned11]

Hey guys!

I am working on a narrative adventure where the protagonist suffers from mild Asperger syndrome. He isn't comfortable in social groups and gets anxiety whenever he becomes part of a conversation.
In order to portray the social disabilities in real life, I have come up with few ideas on how to show them in a game. So hear me out and provide me feedback on the same:

Each conversation happens between Edward and one more NPC.
Edward gets 3 reply options to choose from whenever he's asked something during a conversation. The replies are generally structured like:

1) Smart reply
2) Neutral/irrelevant reply
3) Silence

Now whenever a conversation starts, few white clouds/web start surrounding the edges of the screen and they animate in the form of heartbeat (to convey tension).

Choosing Silence is the easiest as it only requires single click. Neutral/irrelevant reply requires few more clicks and Smart reply is the hardest, requires more clicks to select. If the player keeps selecting Silence, the Smart and Neutral replies becomes harder to select and the tension rises. If the player selects Smart or Neutral, the tension begins to wear out. The whole idea is to convey that how hard it is for an Aspie to talk to someone and how silence is the best option.

I am still not sure if it gets the job done. My aim is to convert the social awkwardness and nervousness faced by a socially disabled person into a gameplay/narrative mechanic. Any feedback/ideas are appreciated!
If you wish to check out how the game looks like, visit out Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thatlittlestar/

[TitoOliveira]

Probably a prototype of what you described would be a good way to feel it.
From the description you gave, i can see the potential and i believe you're in the right path. But it seems to me that with this setup players will never click on silence, and the game will be a button mash on the Smart reply. I can see that you intend to convey the difficulty of giving the answer, but i'm not sure if through carpal tunnel syndrome is the way to accomplish that.

[Dacke]

I think the game Emily is Away played with anxiety in an interesting way.

Minor spoiler:
It all takes place in a chat, you select the gist of what you want to say and then bang on the keyboard for the protagonist to turn it into an actual chat message. But if the protagonist has too much anxiety around it, he will start typing what you wanted to say but then retype something else.

I saw it via a let's play with Sean Bouchard, who's a game design researcher but still always adorably amazed by things:

[valrus]

I like the idea of the clouds, not just symbolizing the tension but also the idea of searching desperately through some obscuring medium under pressure.  What about having the player literally search through the clouds with their cursor for the responses, or parts of the responses, with a time limit?  If they don't find a response in time the player character just stands there awkwardly.  (Or starts out a response and awkwardly trails off.)  Even trickier, if the clouds are themselves words, like a word-cloud visualization, but only a few of them form selectable phrases.

(Also, I like if there sometimes there just isn't a smart response.  You can search as hard as you want, but in some situations there just isn't any correct thing to say.)

[Ned11]

Probably a prototype of what you described would be a good way to feel it.
From the description you gave, i can see the potential and i believe you're in the right path. But it seems to me that with this setup players will never click on silence, and the game will be a button mash on the Smart reply. I can see that you intend to convey the difficulty of giving the answer, but i'm not sure if through carpal tunnel syndrome is the way to accomplish that.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I totally agree with you and your point about players picking Silence all the time. I thought about this and decided that Silence won't be an option for all conversations and there will be times when the player has to choose other replies.

With some brainstorming, I have thought about a modified system. In every conversation, tension rises and the character begins to panic because he's part of a social gathering. Now, in order to calm him, the player has to choose Silence or irrelevant replies in between smart replies so the character can distract himself and relax. The player has to (kind of) strategically keep the conversation going by remaining silent and off-topic so the character doesn't panic much. If he doesn't do that, conversations don't end on a good note.

Second, I was thinking about shuffling the replies in conversations so player has to look out for them and then select one in tension. What do you think about this?

[Ned11]

I think the game Emily is Away played with anxiety in an interesting way.

Minor spoiler:
It all takes place in a chat, you select the gist of what you want to say and then bang on the keyboard for the protagonist to turn it into an actual chat message. But if the protagonist has too much anxiety around it, he will start typing what you wanted to say but then retype something else.

I saw it via a let's play with Sean Bouchard, who's a game design researcher but still always adorably amazed by things:

Thanks for letting me know about the game!

[Ned11]

I like the idea of the clouds, not just symbolizing the tension but also the idea of searching desperately through some obscuring medium under pressure.  What about having the player literally search through the clouds with their cursor for the responses, or parts of the responses, with a time limit?  If they don't find a response in time the player character just stands there awkwardly.  (Or starts out a response and awkwardly trails off.)  Even trickier, if the clouds are themselves words, like a word-cloud visualization, but only a few of them form selectable phrases.

(Also, I like if there sometimes there just isn't a smart response.  You can search as hard as you want, but in some situations there just isn't any correct thing to say.)

Wow, thanks for the idea. Looking for responses in the clouds definitely sounds good. Earlier I had this idea of shuffling the responses so player has to select them under pressure and keep the convo going. Of course due to continuous shuffle, he might select a wrong response but that will help me portray that sometimes you can say things you didn't want to under pressure.

[JWK5]

I am a socially disabled person and I've spent the last 20 years of my life studying why that is and how that is. What I can tell you is that the core of social anxiety is what you think the other person thinks about you (or your behavior).

I think think it has become this trendy thing to portray social anxiety as this lovable awkwardness that mostly manifests in the person making oddball comments and tripping over themselves but the reality is that it is a personal hell of second guessing to the extreme that you can become afraid of such small things as the positions of your hands (What do I do with them when I walk? Put them in my pocket? What if people at the store think I am trying to steal? Keep them open? That looks weird. Keep them closed? Now everyone thinks I am being aggressive!). That's not an exaggeration, that is something that took years of hard work for me to get past. Irrational thinking plays a big role in social anxiety.

If you're going to use social anxiety as a mechanic then I recommend treating each social interaction as a puzzle where the player is trying to guess the meaning behind the NPC's responses (words, body language, mannerisms, etc.). There is what the NPC actually means versus what the player interprets, i.e. what they think the NPC means. Tension occurs in trying to figure out which is which and fighting the impulse to jump to grim conclusions. Social interaction for someone with social anxiety is to be navigating a minefield in hopes of finding some connection while gripped with the constant fear that you'll inevitably step on a mine and destroy those chances for connection for good. It's very irrational black-and-white thinking.

I guess gameplay-wise you could go with something like having the NPC express something to the player and then give the player several responses that each are a responding to a different interpretation of what the NPC expressed. Rather than being obvious about it (i.e. the "positive" response is always the right response) you can keep the player guessing by having the NPCs meaning be something other than you'd expect. There are plenty of times I've found myself feeling in social turmoil because I thought someone was being sincere only to realize shortly thereafter they were being patronizing and I felt like a complete moron because I didn't see it. The guessing game of social anxiety often blinds you to key social cues. It is another factor you might be able to leverage mechanically for the game.

[Ned11]

I am a socially disabled person and I've spent the last 20 years of my life studying why that is and how that is. What I can tell you is that the core of social anxiety is what you think the other person thinks about you (or your behavior).

I think think it has become this trendy thing to portray social anxiety as this lovable awkwardness that mostly manifests in the person making oddball comments and tripping over themselves but the reality is that it is a personal hell of second guessing to the extreme that you can become afraid of such small things as the positions of your hands (What do I do with them when I walk? Put them in my pocket? What if people at the store think I am trying to steal? Keep them open? That looks weird. Keep them closed? Now everyone thinks I am being aggressive!). That's not an exaggeration, that is something that took years of hard work for me to get past. Irrational thinking plays a big role in social anxiety.

If you're going to use social anxiety as a mechanic then I recommend treating each social interaction as a puzzle where the player is trying to guess the meaning behind the NPC's responses (words, body language, mannerisms, etc.). There is what the NPC actually means versus what the player interprets, i.e. what they think the NPC means. Tension occurs in trying to figure out which is which and fighting the impulse to jump to grim conclusions. Social interaction for someone with social anxiety is to be navigating a minefield in hopes of finding some connection while gripped with the constant fear that you'll inevitably step on a mine and destroy those chances for connection for good. It's very irrational black-and-white thinking.

I guess gameplay-wise you could go with something like having the NPC express something to the player and then give the player several responses that each are a responding to a different interpretation of what the NPC expressed. Rather than being obvious about it (i.e. the "positive" response is always the right response) you can keep the player guessing by having the NPCs meaning be something other than you'd expect. There are plenty of times I've found myself feeling in social turmoil because I thought someone was being sincere only to realize shortly thereafter they were being patronizing and I felt like a complete moron because I didn't see it. The guessing game of social anxiety often blinds you to key social cues. It is another factor you might be able to leverage mechanically for the game.

Wow, thank you for taking out time and sharing your views on the topic. I must say things you wrote cleared a lot of things in my mind and I can already think about a lot of ideas now. I will try to implement a few things which you mentioned and I hope it works out. Thanks again!

[whistlerat]

I've thought about how to create a game around this concept too, but it's pretty low on my list of priorities so I'll share my thoughts! I agree with a lot of what's been said above, but wanted to add something regarding the body-language aspect, particularly about finding it difficult to read/interpret what the other person is thinking and feeling.

A first thought might be to try and go the LA Noire route, of having characters with complex and subtle movements the player has to interpret, but I actually think the complete opposite is more interesting - having very classically simple visual characters, like any sprites, but have that art style choice dictated by the fact that this is how your protagonist views other people - as highly similar and unreadable objects. How easy is it to get subtle shifts in facial expression or body language into a 32x32 representation of a human? Hard, right? So you can impose the protagonist's difficulties directly onto the player.

But this works best if the characters are - in every other way - as 'realistic' and flesh out as possible. You need to be able to believe that these characters see each OTHER in a realistic way, that these aren't /actually/ little sprite-people in a video game but real people with feelings and desires and fears, with routines and secrets and who can interact with each other in a 'normal' way. My concept was to take a very very small scope (a single room and short time period, I always toyed with the idea of making it in a classroom and during one class session) and make it as rich as possible, with lots of potential conversations between the NPCs to interrupt/overhear so that it was obvious that 'normal' interactions between people are possible. But the moment the player tries to talk to anyone... suddenly it's hard, and the reactions you get are a bit stiff and awkward, and you hear people whisper 'why was he looking at me funny' when you walk away from a conversation, even though from the player's POV they just saw two sprites staring blankly at each other in their default idle animation and had no idea they were acting at all strange - but that's the whole point.

I like your idea of making social interactions difficult, especially if you choose the easy option. My ideas are more thematic/environmental, but you will definitely need a robust and complex conversation simulator to pull it off in an engaging way. As someone else with aspects of social anxiety, I strongly second the fact that it relates to obsessing over what other people think about you, your actions, your words, what you are doing and what you aren't doing. Perhaps making that a key focus - somehow tying in NPC's opinions to the core mechanic or goal of the game - will help translate that kind of paranoia to the player even if the player themselves is a super confident person in real life who would otherwise find it hard to empathise with this kind of anxiety.