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LRT: Aphantasia
I have aphantasia and I only very recently even learned what that was, thanks to a friend who also has it. Before that I went through life just feeling fundamentally broken because people could not comprehend the fact that I didn't "see" what they did in my mind.
I have aphantasia and I only very recently even learned what that was, thanks to a friend who also has it. Before that I went through life just feeling fundamentally broken because people could not comprehend the fact that I didn't "see" what they did in my mind.
It makes doing anything in front of people extremely nerve wracking, because I have to write everything out to "see" it, and will often cope with repetitive verbal exercises to help me remember things. When I tried playing Witcher 3, I had to stop because every 2 seconds I had to
spam the ability to show me where I needed to go, I'd turn the camera wrong, get distracted by something (thanks ADHD), etc. and lose all sense of where I had to go. Open world games are often a huge effort in misery for me. I'll stick solely to roads, or in survival games like
Ark, you'll find me building paths for myself with torches, markers, etc. Other people will say like, "oh you just go North until you see x, and head East" and I canNOT comprehend it. Sometimes I'll think I have it down to muscle memory, and my brain will go, "That's definitely
the rock" and it's absolutely the incorrect rock, and I'll get lost, and confused, and seeing everything from a new angle makes it even worse to regain my bearings. This absolutely killed Hollow Knight for me, because I had literally no idea where I was at all times, and my
usual methods of, "Just go x direction until you hit something new" did not work for it. I would stare at the map that had no player marker and just feel hopeless. I loved everything about the game, but had to accept it just wasn't made for me and move on. Back in the NES era I
would have graph papers and meticulously move Link to a new area of the map, and copy it down to my graph paper, and had a huge sprawling physical map for me to reference at all times when I was playing. Nowadays there's Wikis to help, but sometimes the maps aren't true to
terrain, and I will run around in an area looking for the exact angle of a screenshot until I'm positive I'm in the right spot. Another problem is "feelings"; I've tried so hard, for so long to treat things like other people do, that I trick myself into having gut feelings.
"Oh, I remember, the greener area is before the purple area" I'll say to myself, and I'll get this warm feeling like, "Yes, that is correct". It's not. The reality is there's multiple green areas, and all I've done is run around in circles for 45 minutes.
As more and more games started adding mini-maps, maps that unveiled as you explored them, waypoints, coordinates, etc. I got super excited; I could finally just play! I knew where I was going! I knew where I had been! But I was surrounded by people who lamented how "hand holding"
videogames had become. And how they were "true gamers" that disabled all extra features, or HUDs, and if you used any of those things, you couldn't even act like you had finished a game. This is all bullshit, of course, but I still feel "bad" on occasion relying on these things.
There's really no point to this thread, except to share my personal experience on a topic that's not well known, and maybe get more people thinking about it, before designing games with no maps, waypoints, indicators, coords, etc.
I won't even go into my time at art school. All I will say on that is: If you are a teacher, please learn empathy.
