Since my last post, I happened upon an abundance of relevant articles. While quite exciting at first, I became overwhelmed with all of the considerations and all of the possibilities surrounding this project. I was especially glad to find a couple of recent articles that discussed real games and VR for autistic contexts, however, and in a manner that summed up relevant studies by highlighting what works and what needs improvement in this field in general. Reading these articles helped me to understand that it was necessary to begin working on creating a good and purposeful design, while also realizing that I first needed to better understand my intended audience.

Fortunately, I was able to meet with my advisor Fahad, who helped tremendously by pointing out that one project cannot solve everything and to instead view this as part of something bigger. I was also able to meet with one of Fahad’s collaborators, Professor Eileen Crehan from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts, who specializes in the autism spectrum disorder.

I shared the project and my ideas with Eileen, which proved very worthwhile. I was able to very quickly understand that the reason that Social Stories are so effective is because of how specific they are and that attempting to generalize a scenario would not work. This means that creating a very specific scenario is important, as is focusing on creating a wide range of customization options. She also gave me a book called “Sincerely Your Autistic Child”, which is written by autistic adults, and a book on Social Stories written by the creator. Eileen also mentioned that I should look into something called exposure therapy. I plan on reading these books to better understand what the (realistic) goals of this project specifically need to be.