This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.
Hello from 2019, where I am still not quite back to my usual schedule. At this point in the week, I think the only thing I can fairly blame is Games Done Quick, which is a charity event that's been going since Sunday. Essentially, a bunch of highly skilled people speedrun games (play games as quickly and efficiently as possible) to entertain people and raise money for a charity.
This winter event always supports Prevent Cancer, which aims to do what its name says. Being suspicious and terrible, I looked into the organization, and they're very good as charities go. So that's pretty cool, particularly since, as of now, the event has raised nearly half a million dollars. I imagine it'll probably double by the end of the week, but as I've never actually watched one of these until this year, I've no idea.
As a a child, I was wholesale banned from playing console video games, and severely limited in my usage of the computer. This kept me from being socialized in the growing culture of video games, and also limited the development of my hand-eye coordination. As a result, I'm not very good at most video games, and have played far fewer of them than most people my age.
Whether this was a good choice on my parents' part or not is debatable, and I won't go into it here. Instead, I'll note that watching this charity event, with video games being played and completed in anywhere from 7 minutes to an hour, means I get to see a whole lot of different kinds of games in a very short time. Certainly, I don't get to see the stories- one of the most basic strategies of speedrunning is "skip the dialogue as fast as you possibly can"- but I do get to see the gameplay. It's interesting to see all the visual tricks and virtual camerawork that goes into things as simple as platformers (where the main aim in the game is to move your avatar from floating platform to floating platform, without falling and dying).
So essentially, it's kind of like getting a very brief education on every game I watch. It lets me earmark games I'd like to see in more detail, which includes most of the story-based ones. Because I'm still not very good at video games, I'll probably watch most of them in Let's Play, rather than buying and attempting to play the game myself.
It's also really cool to see the communities that have formed up around all these video games. As the players play their video games for charity, people from the audience cheer their successes and groan at their accidental failures. Donations come in for the event with messages attached. Some of the messages talk about family or friends fighting cancer, or lost to cancer, but some are simply to cheer on the particular player while they're on camera. In some cases, a whole group in the same community as the player will chip in together for a sizable donation, which tends to bring a smile to the player's face, even as they continue to focus on the game.
Finally, Games Done Quick seems to have put serious effort into being as accepting as possible. While the event is held in English, there are players and attendees from all over the world. Darker skin is no bar to this event. Neither are disabilities, it seems- one of the official staff, an interviewer, was a Little Person (dwarf, midget, choose the least offensive term here). There have been runners and commentators that are clearly trans. Their chosen pronouns have been respected. You can also routinely hear warnings for people with epilepsy, as certain parts of some video games can trigger seizures.
Unsaid prior to now, but meriting comment, is that many of the players and attendees are likely on the autism spectrum. Nobody would walk around saying, "Hey, are you autistic? What about you? And you?" at an event like this, but at one point as a game was starting, there was some microphone feedback, and you could see some people were more pained by the resulting high-pitched shrieking than others. Sensory sensitivity is not a direct indicator of autism, but people with autism often also have sensory sensitivities... and video games tend to attract autistic people as well.
Beyond my virtual attendance of Games Done Quick, everything's settling back to normal, save some scattered doctor's appointments. I'm hoping those won't be too expensive, but we'll see. Going to try to get allergy tests, have my only wisdom tooth removed, and get a pair of weird skin lumps killed off at a dermatologist. The lattermost probably won't be anything interesting (like, y'know, cancer), but they are annoying, so best to kill them just in case.
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