Designing a Social Skills Serious Game for Individuals With Autism

Individuals with autism often have difficulties understanding eye gaze cues. We propose that serious game technology might be especially useful for helping adolescents with autism learn about and develop social skills. To this end, we developed a detective-themed serious game to scaffold learning of social skills for adolescents with autism. The educational goals include learning to use eye gaze information to solve problems in social contexts. Seven adolescents with autism participated in the initial usability testing. Results from the usability testing suggest that this game is feasible and enjoyable for the individuals with autism.