The Joy of Special Interests: Rebranding Autistic Obsession

Whenever I hear about autistic obsession, it seems to mostly discuss the single-minded focus of high-support autistic people. Autistic obsession looks different for everyone—for many, it’s nothing more than a special interest. For others, it drives a career path. And for a few, it can be completely debilitating. In all cases, however, these obsessions lead to great learning and personal satisfaction, and so we need to shift the narrative away from “obsession” and toward “special interest.” These special interests provide autistic people with a source of joy and comfort in addition to being a catalyst for learning and creativity.

MMORPGs

I struggle to define my special interest into one word or topic, but the easiest way to narrow it down seems to be “social gaming.” This shows itself primarily in Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs), and my journey through MMOs is very, very long. It started with MUDs—multi-user dungeons—text-based online RPGs. I discovered Realms of Despair in 1996, when I was a teenager and would play the game during my high school computer class.

In 2001, I was working at an HP call centre, and got my first PC—from Future Shop, of all places. That PC allowed me to play EverQuest, my first true MMORPG.

For my whole life, I struggled socially. I would never have more than one friend, and that one friendship would only ever last as long as it took for me to realize that he was my best friend, but I wasn’t his best friend—or my family would move again, which happened far too much for a family that was not in the military. But when I played these online games, I had access to thousands of other players who I could be friends with for the duration of one group together, and then I moved on, often never to see them again. Even today, where my MMORPG of choice is Final Fantasy XIV, my friends list has one person on it—and he stopped playing the game. The real-world social struggles of an undiagnosed autistic youth made online games seem so easy—I didn’t need to get too deeply personal. I didn’t need to cultivate relationships with people. I just showed up, healed the party, and left when I was ready to leave.

A Deeper Dive

As my MMO interest evolved, I found myself trying to better understand how things worked “under the hood.” That is, how the systems interacted with one another. This started at an early age, but Realms of Despair gave me an opportunity to peek under the hood, when the game’s administrators brought me on board to the admin team. This gave me access to the programs and scripts that NPCs used to interact with players and breathe life into the game. I would create elaborate bosses for players to fight, which would give me access to research data as players died to (or defeated) my creations. Games like Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft still use similar scripts for their NPCs, though far more advanced than what I was doing in the mid-aughts.

Recognizing that I liked knowing how things worked, I started working on software. One of the first programs I studied was Adobe Dreamweaver, but that was only after I studied and taught myself HTML. I knew I wanted to build websites, but I wanted to understand the code before I went to a visual editor like Dreamweaver. My early sites were horrible, but as I experimented and learned, I filed it all away in my special interest folder in my brain, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice. I can still write a website in 2001’s version of HTML. Not well, mind you. But occasionally, I go into Notepad and start writing things just for fun.

A Drive to Learn

I also found a lot of interest in Excel. I had dabbled in Excel before, but it was during my MBA that I learned how genuinely fun I find spreadsheets. My job now is only about 20% spreadsheets. I’d like to get it up to 75% spreadsheets one day. Having a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, every group project wanted me to be the writer and editor, while I really wanted to go into Excel and do financial analysis. I had to put my foot down halfway through—not an easy task when I was respected for my writing and editing skill, but you’re in school to learn, and I was missing out on learning opportunities. I got to dive deep into Excel for the second half, and for my Capstone, and came out the other end with a satisfying amount of knowledge, as well as a drive to continue learning. Even now, any opportunity I get to work in Excel—especially with things I don’t know yet—gets me excited.

There is a point to all this jumping—my special interest in understanding how things work led me to social gaming, which I still enjoy to this day. It also led me to learn HTML and Excel, which are valuable career skills. I like telling stories, and now I have specialized skills for telling stories through a variety of mediums.

At the end of the day, autistic people shouldn’t feel guilty for our special interests—even if they don’t lead to expansive growth. But every special interest provides learning and creative inspiration for people, meaning that you are learning something through your special interest. Obsessions don’t teach you valuable skills—special interests do. Autistic obsession does not exist.