Tilde Lowengrimm on Nostr: I'm deeply grateful to the videogame Cultist Simulator for embedding and teaching me ...

I'm deeply grateful to the videogame Cultist Simulator for embedding and teaching me to apply several powerful lessons which I think are particularly meaningful to my AuDHD experience.

It won't surprise you to hear that Cultist Simulator is game set in an alternative reimagined 20th-century England-esque world where post-Victorian occult mysticism is real. You work to build the sort of cult that you'd normally expect the heroes in the story to be opposing. When you start the game, you know nothing about the world. As you recruit cultists, practice arcane rituals, and summon entities from beyond this realm, you gradually begin to understand the utterly bananas rules which govern the mystical forces you're trifling with.

At no point does the game really explain anything to you. You can only pick up the rules through trial and oh so many many errors. The normal logic you might expect to apply, absolutely does not, and you are obliged to discover how to express your actions through arcane interactions of a multitude of cards and a narrow set of opaquely-named verbs like "talk" or "dream", while interpreting the extremely brief and oblique text describing the results of your actions. This is perhaps a perfect ludic analogue for the autistic experience of learning the secret allistic social norms, including the norm that you're simply not allowed to discuss or explain social norms.

To advance your grand vision of ascension or transformation or discovery requires executing untold fiddly little steps. Some of the cards you need decay and vanish after seconds to a minute or two, and every verb action you take has a duration of half a minute to a minute and a half. Performing complex tasks requires an incredible deal of planning and preparation to get all the right cards on the board at the same time. Even then, if you misjudged or something else comes up (more on that later), you might acquire the wrong card or lose one you need. If you lose focus on your whole plan for even a single in-game minute, you'll probably trip over yourself and have to start this step over from the top. This is just the everyday ADHD experience of trying to do one (1) task which it turns out is actually a twenty-three-step dad-from-Malcolm-in-the-Middle executive functioning nightmare.

But the most powerful part of the game and the one I've taken most to heart is the concept of seasons. One of the verbs in the game is entirely out of your control. It's called Time Passes and its most basic function is to consume money every minute. But that's only the simplest function. Every time it ticks over, it produces a new "season" for you to cope with. The best seasons, by far, are the ones where nothing happens and you can just get on with things.

The bad depression time is called Bleak Thoughts, and seeks out any "Dread" cards on the board. If you aren't able to offset them with sufficient Contentment (or, possibly obsession, which the game calls "Fascination"), the game is over and your character does not survive. Of course: the Dread card is easy to create and stays on the board for several minutes, while the Contentment card is very short-lived and difficult to reliably find.

There's also a hyperfixation era called the Season of Visions which looks for obsession ("Fascination") in a similar way. If you aren't able to offset your obsessive thoughts, this season will also end the game with you completely losing touch with reality and perhaps being involuntarily committed.

Each of these seasons is an absolute existential threat to your character. Any one of them can destroy the progress you've worked so hard to build. Even if you pull out all the stops and completely focus all your efforts on surviving the current season, you aren't guaranteed to survive it. But of course, if you focus entirely on defying depression, you have to take time off work and your boss might be mad at you. And it goes without saying that whatever complex multi-step task you're currently on the verge of completing will be utterly ruined.

And I… Look, there's no one universal experience of neurodiversity. That's why it's neuro*diversity*. But, wow. If there's a better collection of experiences to model my everyday AuDHD subjectivity, I have yet to find it. But the beauty of coming to this through the medium of a game is that by the time I mapped what my cultist was going through to my own brainworms, I had already developed and tested workable strategies for dealing with those problems through the medium of the game itself! I'm not talking about the specific game details of knowing that you can talk to Sulochana Amavasya about literally anything and it'll feel like time isn't passing at all, or the fact that one of the most straightforward ways to experience consistent contentment is to find a job which leaves you enough space to enjoy creativity when you need an outlet.

The larger lesson which I find so much value in is that there is incredible utility in recognizing the seasons of your own mind. Which afflict and which comfort you? How do you anticipate and observe the start of the season of burnout, and what steps do you need to take to prevent it from consuming you? Is this a season you already have the tools and reasouces to deal with, or do you need to take a step back from your fragile plans to focus just on appeasing the unreasonable challenges your mind is throwing at you today? How do you recognize when the "game" has randomly offered you a "card" which doesn't show up often, so you should change plans straight away to take advantage of the short window when you can use it? What does it mean for you when an important-seeming obligation is fully occupying some part of your life locking up all your efforts there and preventing you from making progress on other things?