#experientialdesign #prototyping #game #research
Most experiential design treats friction as a problem. These prototypes (one a solo narrative game, one a live multiplayer experience) ask: what if friction were a tool to build empathy?
Role
What I found
Meaningful constraints didn't just teach players about neurodivergent experience. They let neurotypical players feel aspects of it and reflect on moments when they misattributed the behavior of neurodivergent people in their lives. Constraints, when carefully designed, became the mechanism for empathy.
Why this project matters
Neurodiversity. The idea that individuals perceive and engage with the world in diverse ways, recognizing that there is no single "correct" way to think, learn, or behave (Baumer & Frueh, 2021). Conditions include Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more.
30-40%
Unemployment rate among neurodivergent adults in the US compared to 10.1% of disabled people and a national average of 3.7% (Johns Hopkins University)
21%
Gap between neurodivergent (58%) and non-disabled (79%) graduation rates at UC in 2021 (Gauvain)
Where (part of) the problem lives
Double Empathy Problem
Empathy Gap
The Double Empathy Problem, coined by Damian Milton, argues that neurotypical and neurodivergent people struggle to read each other. My research posits that the cost falls disproportionately on neurodivergent people due to the lack of empathy on behalf of the neurotypical majority. I call this problem the Empathy Gap. This project aims to address it.
Prototype 1
A solo, choice-based narrative game about masking (the effort of hiding neurodivergent traits to fit in).
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that games can limit our agency in ways that let us experience modes of agency we couldn't otherwise. I built Playing in Snow around this idea, inspired by a real story from the Understood podcast: a child whose mother insists she wear thick gloves while playing in the snow, gloves that made her feel like "the world was on mute." The prototype enacts that muting directly through dulling colors as the story progresses, putting players in the position of experiencing the world as it grows more distant. It is a small, specific slice of what neurodivergent experience can feel like, and the goal is to let players inhabit it briefly: to feel the frustration of a world growing further away, by choices that aren't theirs.
What playtesting revealed
When choices didn't produce visibly different outcomes, players stopped feeling constrained. Instead, they felt the game was just narrating to them. Limitation alone isn't constrained agency/friction.
Narrative resonance is conditional. Players who'd had experience playing in snow as children connected deeply. Those who hadn't struggled to relate to the experience.
Prototype 2
A live, multiplayer game where each player gets a different communication constraint. They have to collaborate anyway.
If Playing in Snow failed players who couldn't recognize the story, Mismatch would remove the story entirely. Twelve players, four breakouts of three, each person assigned a different constraint inspired by real neurodivergent communication styles and challenges (working memory drop, delayed processing, AAC use). Each group, comprising different people with different communication challenges, has to complete tasks together.
Mismatch took the friction from a webpage into a (virtual) room of people.
What playtesting revealed
Open roles produced agency. Because actions weren't scripted, players interpreted constraints in ways that felt true to them. That ownership made the constraints feel truer.
Difference was felt, not explained. Players described real frustration mid-game: from communicating with someone whose constraint they didn't share, and from being misread when their own constraint shaped their behavior. In debrief, several connected that frustration to behaviors they'd previously read as rude or distant in neurodivergent friends and colleagues.
Debrief did the translation work. The game produced the sensation. Structured reflection turned sensation into perspective shift. Without the debrief, the game was just an annoying puzzle.
What two prototypes taught me
Meaningful constraints can generate empathy when designed intentionally. Playing in Snow showed that when constraints didn't produce visible consequences, they lost their value. Mismatch's constraints in a live social setting made invisible barriers felt in real time. The insight isn't that constraints are always generative, it's that the right constraints, in the right context, can turn abstract differences into embodied experience.
Different formats produce different kinds of empathy. Playing in Snow created internal empathy through recognition, dependent on the player's own lived experience. Mismatch created relational empathy through friction, felt in real time. The form of an experience shapes what kind of empathy is possible at all.
Information teaches concepts; experience reshapes perspective. Participants knew what neurodivergence and masking were before either prototype. What they didn't know was what those words felt like from the inside.