How my disabilities affect my gaming

I have 3 disabilities that I am diagnosed with: Depression disorder, autism and ADHD. To say that none of them affects how I game, would be a lie.

Depression makes sure I won’t be gaming that day. When I am in a severe depressive dip, I will surely go to bed quite early (sometimes as soon as 3 pm, and won’t come out until my mood brightens a bit, or when I wake up the next day.

Autism is the fun part of gaming. The obsessive part. The part that makes me want to know everything about a game. I used to know all 150 pokemon by number and by evolution. I could name them all. Same goes for PUBG at the moment (although I am not very good at it, I can tell you the best weapons at the moment (for my playstyle) and what is coming up on the servers on xbox, because I just follow it so extensively.

Now, my latest obsessive game is the division 2, in which I clocked my 100th hour this last weekend (28th april), and love to research and collect all the things (which is my main thing in almost every game I play. I try to collect all the things.

The biggest disability for gaming, has to be ADHD. Before my Rilatine was prescribed (before I even knew I was an adhd’er), I played games too. I would play a few minutes here, then switch over to a different game and played a few minutes there. I couldn’t play RPG’s like Skyrim because it would take me to long to walk from objective to objective. The same is still happening in Sea of Thieves. I love the game, I love the concept, but it takes to damn long to sail to an island, do the required things and sail back, even on Rilatine.

It affects how I play shooters as well. I can not sit still. Ever. In a group in the division I am mostly the guy that dies, because I can not wait long enough and stay in cover long enough. I am also the guy who makes the ballsy move to take out opponents that stay in cover because they are suppressed, which might get me killed because I walk through a hail of bullets. In PUBG I can not sit still long enough to look around properly and combined with me being autistic, I don’t process the information that I gather fast enough, so I get killed quite often, but I make a lot of kills too, because I don’t do what others expect me to do (like stay in cover long enough).

In games like The division, I am the one that loves to flank and take enemies from different angles. I love to go for the subjective and play as good as I can, even though I have my difficulties, but the fun thing is, is that I do main missions with other players, and they help me get up again and kill more enemies. I don’t think my erratic Rambo playstyle is a disadvantage for the other players, because I build my character that way. I make him stronger against a certain type of enemy and primarely focus on that type. I use their weakpoints against them.

Oddly enough, although I can not sit still, even in games, my favourite kind of games are sneaking games, like Hitman 2, Rainbow six siege (although the community is really, really, really toxic), Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and now… The division.

I love games with a lot of lore as well, but they have to be somewhat grounded in reality, like I can not play fantasy style games, because I do not enjoy them, but I love Assassin’s creed, the lore and the background novels are awesome, same for the latest novel about the division, which I am currently reading.

You see, that disability can affect gaming and not only in an overt way. I don’t think there is a way to make adjustments for my kind of gamingdisability, but it might give food for thought for gaming publishers.

Every post is written first in scrivener 3, which you can get a 30 day free trial of here at literature and latte.

Geef een antwoord

Het e-mailadres wordt niet gepubliceerd. Vereiste velden zijn gemarkeerd met *