A Serious Game for Learning the Conversation Method with Autism for Typically Developing

Abstract

In this study, a serious game was developed to enable typically developing to learn the most appropriate method of conversation with autism. Autism tend to have difficulty with interpersonal relationships because they find it difficult to understand conversational implicatures. As a solution to this problem, we propose a serious game to enable typically developing to learn how to speak to autism in a way they can understand, including how best to convey conversational implicatures. This serious game simulates the experience of autism of being unable to understand conversational implicatures, using conversations based on real life examples, in order to teach players why autism cannot understand what they mean and how they can paraphrase their message. To verify the efficacy of this serious game, an experiment was conducted with 56 students. Experimental results suggested that the system is effective for learning how to speak especially among typically developing who were rarely involved with autism.