I was in sixth grade when I bought my first handheld Nintendo console, the Nintendo DS. The first game I’d bought on my own was a game called “Nintendogs”, where you adopted virtual puppies and fed, groomed, trained, and overall cared for them. My parents couldn’t understand why I was in love with a world of virtual dogs when I had my own, real-life dog at home. They couldn’t understand (at the time) that it wasn’t about that. I wasn’t trying to socially isolate myself and play video games to disconnect from friends and family. There was something simply soothing about engaging in a world that was not my own. The pressures of neurotypical life can become too much to bear sometimes, and I found therapeutic value in engaging in a world where my ASD didn’t negatively impact me in any way; all I had to do was keep these puppies healthy, happy, fed. If anything, it made me a better dog owner over time because I had some virtual practice runs. As someone on the spectrum, having that extra practice is invaluable. It gave me a way to process the world around me by packaging it in a video game that I could take time to play and learn at my own pace. School is not the only place in life to learn. Sometimes learning comes in the simplest forms, like playing a video game with virtual dogs. I can’t vouch for the therapeutic value of all video games, but being on the spectrum can be an incredibly isolating experience, and being able to succeed in a world, even virtual, can be extremely validating and confidence-boosting.
~Anonymous Writer
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