Video games could help kids with autism learn social skills

Searching for a way to help children with autism, researcher Gail Alvares came up with a fairly simple equation.

"We like games, we know that kids like games, so why don't we develop something that could become an additional part of therapy," she told Mashable Australia.

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As part of her work at the University of Western Australia and the Telethons Kids Institute, a medical research organisation based in Perth, Alvares is working on a video game project aimed at teaching kids with autism vital social skills.

The game, currently dubbed Frankie and Friends, is intended to help such children begin to process social information — an idea Alvares described in an article for ABC News.

Image: Telethons Kids Institute

"One of the difficulties that some children with autism may experience is paying attention to social information with people," she explained to Mashable Australia. "They may not make eye contact with people or they might pay more attention to objects than people or faces."

If parents, teachers or therapists had learning tools that could start to shift that attention, to help children with autism prioritise people and particularly their faces in social interactions, it could have a significant impact.

Made for children ages 5 to 12, Alvares' three games focus on a sausage dog named Frankie who needs help finding his friends. 

"All three [games] target particular social skills that we think at least some kids with autism would find challenging," she said. "There are things like understanding emotions, or being able to pay attention to faces over objects, and also a skill called joint attention, which is being able to follow somebody else's gaze."

The games are intended to be fun, so kids don't actually realise they're training. There's also no language component and no written instructions. 

"This is specifically designed with children with autism in mind, because we know that in amongst the spectrum of kids with autism, there is a wide variety of cognitive abilities and language abilities," she added.

While the game is very promising, Alvares said the research team wants to ensure it's truly effective through extensive trials before making it available to the public. 

The idea of serious gaming (i.e. gaming with a purpose other than entertainment) is an emerging field within autism intervention and therapy. However, few games have proven to be effective in her opinion. 

Image: Telethons Kids Institute

Worse, many of them are not engaging nor fun, and aren't designed with children's enjoyment as a priority.

"We're giving these games to children to test at home and measuring using eye tracking where they're actually looking in a real social environment," she said.

Alvares is conscious that parents of children with autism are already asked to do so much. "We hope to make it commercially available if we can show some evidence. Parents of kids with autism are already being charged enormous amounts of money for so many things — therapy or anything that might have the hint of having some effect."

Once Frankie and Friends is up and running, the team hopes it can become a platform to start developing a range of other games targeting issues that children with autism might have difficulty with. That could even be going to the dentist or the hairdresser. 

"Things that we might take for granted children may do, children with autism might find really challenging," she explained.

Far from wasting time, these video games could provide kids with autism help with some of their toughest problems.