Autistic Pride Day: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Its vitally important when you’re the parent of an autistic child that you utilise methods of learning that are serious and learned.

Megan runs over to me holding up one of what I like to refer to as ‘interactive learning simulations’ and what the rest of the world likes to refer to as ‘XBox games’. This particular XBox game revolves around the empowerment of females and how difference is sometimes a good thing. Oh yeah, and vampires.

“Can you start the dishes?” Calls down my wife from upstairs where she cleaning the bathroom.

“Love to babe but Megan’s brought one of her interactive learning simulations over for me to play.”

“You mean she wants you to play on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Well, yeah.”

Silence. I take that as a good sign and plug Buffy in (please ignore the innuendo in that). She starts up like the dependable game, er I mean, learning environment, she is and off we go.

Megan only really likes me to interact with (OK, OK, ‘play with’) one bit of the game and thats the first 3 levels. For those of you familiar with Buffy she quips and wisecracks over the second seasons environment. For those of you unfamiliar with the Buffysphere Megan lets me complete the training level and the first 2 real levels and then I must restart.

By my own reckoning I’ve done these three levels approaching 700 times. It would not be egotistical to describe myself as the Yoda of the first three levels of this game. Thats right, not the Obi Wan, not the Skywalker but the frigging Yoda. As one of my son’s favourite TV wrestlers loves to opine – I’m. That. Damn. Good.

The gaming element went out of it months ago – what I do now is time myself. I’m embarrassingly pleased with myself if I beat my best time. Or I go through only taking the Health I started with, or only killing the vamps with my bare hands (tricky but not impossible).

Thing is, Meggy doesn’t care – she simply loves the endless repetition and sameness. She finds it a comfort and a stimulant. She doesn’t really stim whilst I play she simply sits and stares, fascinated – Daddy is the stim whilst he plays.

I pull off a particularly tricky reverse jump/punch and decapitate one of the irritating shambling skeletons and feel nauseatingly pleased with myself. You can guarantee that I’ll try and do that again, only better, next time I go through this bit.

Lots of Doctors and other professionals will tell parents that encouraging stimming (stimming is autistic behaviours that the autistic finds stimulating – usually hand flapping, rocking, singing, walking on tip toes, circling a room etc) is A Bad Thing (and yes, you can hear the caps in their voice when they say it) but I say – bollocks to that – she enjoys it and as far as I can see it does no harm. Lots of autistics say its a calming thing and help them ‘synchronise’ with the sensory input all around them. Sounds pretty good to me.

Uh-oh. I have to fight Spike. Particularly beloved by my wife on the show (Weird. He’s peroxide blond and emaciated. I’m dark haired and what can kindly be described as ‘big boned’.), Spike is Buffy’s arch-nemisis until Season 6 of the show when they become lovers. Spikes quite hard to beat – especially when you’re playing the game on ‘insanely difficult’ – and my aim in this section is to kick the crap out of him without him laying a hand (well, claw) on me. After a particularly sexy prolonged hanging bicycle kick he flees. Chicken.

This signals the end of Megan’s interest in the game. Where most kids might wander off and do something else, Megan simply makes me restart the game from the training level again. She’s the same with all her interactive devices – she likes to watch the BBC ident screen at the end of her Teletubby DVD’s again and again and sits with the DVD remote watching, rewinding, watching, rewinding, watching, rewinding until whatever governs these things is satisfied.

I prefer playing Buffy to watching the BBC ident appearing and fading hundred of times.

And so off Buffy and I go again, she runs towards the edge of a cliff, I press the red ‘A’ key and she jumps the Cliff and grabs the edge of the opposite cliff and runs off towards her final (to Megan) fight with the dead bloke my wife fancies called Spike in 9 mins 26 seconds or less.