You have definitively diagnosed yourself as not being on the spectrum.

Hard to describe, but there is a tendency to self-sabotage (for lack of a better term) that you have to take into account. Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.

This is correlated with the amount of energy and attention you have to give to processing your environment, much like the health bars in the game UI.

▲ jancsika a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.

But in the context of the beginning of a game, people without autism are probably confused. Why isn't the car's environment already tuned to the character's exact specifications?

I get some of the potential reasons why after playing the game for a bit. But I still would have liked to see a callback to this. E.g., if I drive to lunch with coworkers I could choose to mask by letting the passenger tune the radio. Then the next morning I get a painful sound when I turn on the car. Ah, I get it now! That seems like more satisfying gameplay-- maybe the game already does it and I died too early to see!

▲ tcdent a day ago | parent | next [-]

We're definitely reading too far into this, but the game does incorporate this concept, so I'll make the case.

You don't get to choose every option every day. Some days you're on, and you make (almost) all of the right choices for your wellbeing. But not every day is like that.

▲ bongodongobob 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Optimized and tuned for what?

Try tuning your entire environment and then maintaining it all the time. Best I can do is get it into a failure mode that isn't a disaster.

Mapping anything into a perfect system fails. So I'm surrounded by half working shit that works well enough that the energy from the shittyness that it sucks from me is made up by the fact that it's good enough to not crash out over. But I will still stress. Because I do want to fix the Bluetooth but I also have 8000 other things at home to perfectly tune as well.

My shoes are a year and a half old. A little stained, a little green from mowing the lawn. I sure as fuck don't want to go to a shoe store and tell the poor young worker there that I don't need their help. I'm not buying shoes without trying them on, so internet is out. When the soles fall off and the social impact is great enough, I'll replace them.

I haven't cut my hair in a year and a half because the hair dresser lady that I went to for 15 years moved away. Staring into a mirror while someone talks to me and cuts my hair is a fucking nightmare. I know this makes me look unconventional, but worth it for now. I have to carefully wash, condition, dry, and brush my hair. It's more work. But it's optimized.

	▲	imp0cat 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`I'm not buying shoes without trying them on, so internet is out.` You could just buy the same shoes over and over. Works for me.

▲ PaulHoule a day ago | parent | prev [-]

What if you're like gay and always struggling to stay in the closet?

	▲	jancsika a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Did you play the game? If I'm understanding it correctly (a big if), every single time the author is forced to leave out edge cases when talking to management it is a form of masking. They have to suppress their natural urge[1] to list the edge cases, and come up with a more appropriate message based on a non-intuitive guess about the salient points their interlocutor wants to know. That implies active work to mask that is almost certainly measured in hours per day, across nearly every domain of communication and human interaction. How many hours a day does the average employee spend talking to coworkers about their sexual preference? Edit: 1: An urge probably backed up by a good faith, well-reasoned, ethical understanding of the literal words that the manager spoke to them!
	▲	MrDarcy a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then you’re like a closeted gay autistic person. Speaking for a friend.