> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.

If you're talking about what happens after the first day, I think it's not due to any of the "stats" but rather because your first day is long and so you're running late on the second day, and for whatever reason you have nothing ready-to-eat at home. (Might be related to that option to go to the grocery store that you probably didn't take.)

In other words, it's seemingly a narrative-driven obstacle.

> it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.

Could be a rental car. Though my guess here is that the author actually comes from a place where the combination of culture and socioeconomics means they commute via public transit; and so they're actually trying to translate their experiences of the social impingement of public transit into analogous experiences when driving.

(Personally, I think a better translation would be being stuck in gridlock, or getting on a highway via an onramp where you keep getting cut off, etc, where there's an autistic itch there to get the other human drivers to realize that, when driving, they should "realize they're all cogs in a global optimization problem and so drive as predictably as possible, in order to decrease burstiness and so increase throughput, even at the expense of their individual perceived end-to-end latency.")

> Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.

AFAICT the "masking" gauge seems to be some rolled-up combination of 1. an odd domain-specific form willpower ("spoons" but you can only spend them on masking-related tasks, and when depleted you can't mask even if you still have motivation to do other things), with 2. a measure how close others are to deducing from your behavior that you are in fact on the autistic spectrum. (As if that's something you could ever expect to keep your coworkers and boss from realizing about you over years of continuous interaction.)

I say this because of the interaction I encountered about coming to a charity event, where literally being explicit about how you have a problem dealing with that kind of social situation... decreases the "masking" gauge. If it was purely #1, I'd expect the gauge to go up. It's only under interpretation #2 where it would go down.

(Or maybe you could describe the "masking" gauge in classical D&D terms as a WIS stat where masking attempts are Will-based saving throws?)

Honestly, I'd like to just see the source code for this. I'm surprised it's not linked; I feel like reading the source (hopefully with a lot of code comments about why the given heuristics were chosen) is the obvious "next step" to the game communicating what it wants to communicate.