As a Child, Were You Good at Imaginative Play?

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One of the apparent symptoms of Asperger's is an inability to play imaginatively or to use imagination; I used to have only mild difficulty with this. When playing by myself with dolls or toys, I would start a good story with a logical plot-line, yet often, when I reached a part of the story whose physical action I enjoyed (i.e burying the main character under a pile of sand in the sandbox) the game would unravel and I'd spend the rest of the time repeating that same action over and over. I had a slightly better time when playing with other kids, because they made sure the game stayed on-track, but I was a difficult playmate because I insisted on being the same characters and playing the roles of the same dolls/toys every time without ever letting anyone else have a go. As kids, did you ever have trouble engaging in appropriate imaginative play or interacting with others on that level? Did you "outgrow" it? I'm fairly sure I did, because now I'm an avid fiction writer (although every once in a while I'll give playing the way I used to a try, only to discover that the game still unravels at intervals whose physical stimulation is more interesting than the plot!)

I had (and still do have) a very vivid imagination. As a child I pretended to be my favorite fictional characters and animals. I also had a very intricate storyline involving my collection of plush toys. As I got older, I started coming up with "mental fanfiction" for my favorite movies/TV shows. It's my own private world so I have never written down any of the stories I have come up with.

For what it's worth...

I was staying with my cousin one day, and the show Frasier came on TV. When it was over, we filled a bowl with water, took a few barbies and acted out a "hot tub" party scene with the barbies as characters from Frasier.

We were 13.

I generally had little problem with imaginative play. That said, a lot of my imaginative play involved familiar tropes--much of it was grounded in reality to a large extent. Most of it was set in the present day, and somehow tied into my various special interests. My Lego castle set became a theme park of sorts within a modern-day city. I would take elements of the real world around me and integrate it into my imaginary world. But within that, I dreamed up entire metropolitan areas, highway networks, mass transit systems, you name it.

I have debated this with myself for a while now. I do know that I did not like to play with action figures or any toys that represented people or could be considered anthropomorphic. I preferred representations of actual real machines and not, say, something like Transformers. Other than that, and my tendency to dismantle toys to see how they worked, I guess I played like a normal boy would. I built things with blocks and used toy cars to knock them down, etc. I loved my LEGO(s), Lincoln Logs, Erector Set (think Meccano in the UK) and any type of toy that let me create and build things from my imagination. I also was obsessed with building model cars, and liked to mix and match parts to build my own creations. Likewise, I went through periods of being a total social outcast and periods of being a social leader, depending on the mix of children around me. I never wanted to be a follower though and much preferred to be alone to going along with what others wanted me to do if it was not something I wanted to do in the first place. At eleven or twelve, I would spend my allowance money buying tools rather than toys. I used to repair lawn mowers I would find in the garbage as well as the bicycles of neighborhood kids. I was also interested in politics as early as the third grade and liked discussing them with adults. In the fourth or fifth grade I got in trouble for my choice of reading material for our reading time. You were allowed to bring in any book you wanted, so I brought in a Chilton's repair manual for 1968-79 Chevrolet full size sedans. (I had bought it at an outlet store we visited when I was on my summer vacation) This was not what the teacher had in mind though, and so I was told to find another book.

Now, I may not actually have some form of autism, so what I wrote here may or may not mean something. However, to me it shows a pattern of disinterest in conforming to a social group starting at an early age. My relationships were conditional upon the other person sharing my interests and rarely, if ever, involved me compromising to share an interest of theirs I would otherwise not want anything to do with. I tend to see it as a confirmation of my suspicion of Asperger's, but I may just have been the world's most stubborn and obstinate child with ADHD and social issues.

Your description of yourself here sounds an awful lot like me. Like, almost exactly.

Last edited by FishStickNick on 28 Jul 2012, 3:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am curious then. How good or bad are you now at social interaction? I find that I can pass as quite normal in work situations and can engage in idle chit chat. However, I still refer conversations to have a purpose and direction and still have no interest in most of the social situations most people choose to engage in. To this day I have no interest in sports or most of popular culture and prefer my social occasions to be focused around accomplishing something rather than socialization as it's own end. So, I would have no issue going to play pool somewhere as I like pool, but the thought of just going to a bar to "hang out" bores me to tears. Likewise, given the chance to go to a big party or help someone do an engine swap, I would do the engine swap. I still try to lead and take over in these situations, but I have learned to let others lead now so that I can learn from them. It seems that every thing I enjoy is always somewhat educational, and I find that quite odd.

Yeah, this sounds a lot like me. I can partake in small talk, but I try to avoid it when I can. I'd much rather talk about things that interest me than idle chit chat, and I usually don't strike up conversation unless I have something I want to tell you. I don't understand why people waste verbiage in emails with pleasantries--let's get to the point, please.

I go to social functions on occasion--say, if a group of coworkers goes somewhere after work and invites me--but I generally don't stay long, and I rarely have anything to say unless the conversation veers toward something I'm interested in--in which cases I come alive. I don't have much to say otherwise, really. I often just end up sitting there, minding my own business, thinking of how I can say goodbye and leave. Others in the group try to engage me in small talk; I'll reply, but it takes me a fair amount of thought, and I don't feel like I have much to say. I tend to avoid large gatherings, and when I do go to them, I stick with people I know.

I'm not a huge sports fan--though I enjoy baseball--and I'm not really into pop culture. I prefer "thinking" tasks, and a lot of the things I enjoy doing involve learning about something. I gravitate toward people who share my interests, too.

This!

I was horrible at imaginative play but if other kids needed me to be a tree I could stand in and be a tree. This is actually as close to what happened. Then I began to create my own films in my head and acted them out, alone but sometimes around people. When I eventually did play with others I would be way too literal.

These days I still can't do it. When I'm around little kids I teach them how to draw and get past a hard level on a video game.

The stereotype was right about me.

The thing is though, I do initiate my fair share of conversation, at least with people I know. It doesn't always seem to have a purpose but instead is something I do just to share their company. It's part of the duality I see in myself. I'm like 50/50 autistic/neurotypical. I do get certain things, but I don't know if this is just the natural me or an adaptation that lets me lead a somewhat normal life. It may also help that I have delivered pizza for over 15 years now, so I am fairly comfortable around people. I am awkward at times, but I think everyone is. The exception is anything with a romantic or sexual expectation. I can talk to women just fine, so long as there are no expectations beyond basic conversation. In those situations I see them like I would anyone else and do not tend to think I have a chance, so there is no pressure on me. Flirting though is something I have a difficult time with. I often can't tell if I am being flirted with or if the woman is angry at me. Supposedly though, this is a typically autistic response to flirtatious body language. Then again, so is my tendency to want to run away due to the confusion I feel in those situations.

Yeah, this is why I kind of go back and forth on whether or not I have AS.

I'll initiate with people I know well, but it's not just talking to be polite; it's because I have something I want to share with that particular person. I have some degree of social anxiety, although I had some severe social anxiety as a kid I sometimes have a hard time approaching people. But I worked retail for a couple years, and in my current occupation I have to take meetings with people I've never met on a fairly regular basis.

Social awkwardness is a constant. I sometimes have a hard time expressing my thoughts. I sometimes have people tell me I look upset even though I'm fine. I find it uncomfortable to hold eye contact, even around those I know well and feel comfortable with. But on the other hand, I seem to do fine on facial expressions for the most part, and I usually grasp metaphors and idioms (though I often visualize their literal meanings).

Flirting is something I've never quite figured out, to be honest. Like, how do you know if the other person is really interested in you, or is just being polite? When is it OK to approach the other person?

In my case, I could never play imaginative games with other children: I had the tendency to zone out whenever I was involved in role-playing and ended up in my own imaginary world. Maybe this was because their envisioned play was unpredictable and too confusing for me -- there were too many characters tied up in too many relationships.

However when I'm daydreaming in my own world, I fuse together the scenes from my favourite books and movies and come up with different outcomes for those particular situations. This is probably the main reason why I hate watching movies at the cinema or with other people -- I can't pause the film in order to pace about and merge the scenes in the film into my own world. But, despite this, my imagination feels very limited since it's so repetitive - I only have a handful of different scenes which I merge together but after a while my imagination runs out and then I either dream the same thing again or I change the outcome.

I'm not sure what he appropriate level of imaginative play is.

Being FTM I had a lot of toys that do not match those typical for my gender identity. I had a lot of barbie toys as a child, lots of dolls, clothes and furniture, and they were what I played with primarily.

I couldn't play barbies with other people because they didn't do it right, they wanted barbie to be a princess with a magic unicorn and such like, whereas I thought that the most fun was to be had rearranging the house and furniture into the most realistic configuration. I had a two tier sort of house esc structure, but it had no stairs which highly frustrated me so I preferred to make bungalows. It also irritated me that bath room things were scarce, finding a toilet to decent scale was a nightmare. I also greatly enjoyed lining them all up, then separating them into families with similar facial features/colouring.

My mother enjoyed playing barbies with me when I was younger. She was the one responsible for all of the imagination and plot line behind it, and she chose some ridiculously adult themes - prostitution, drug addiction, abusive relationships, unplanned pregnancy and cancer. My mother and have a warped parent-child relationship - this was especially true then - and I think she was subconsciously using this as therapy to deal with her own issues. But then who knows, maybe they are appropriate topics for an eight-year-old.

I also had a lot of baby dolls, which I enjoyed but all I would do with them is carry them around. I wouldn't mimic changing its nappy or feeding it, etc.

I was also very discerning as to which adverts for toys I said 'mum, I want that' to. If it featured something unrealistic, such as a mermaid out for a baby doll, then I wasn't interested and would think it's stupid, but something realistic, for instance a barbie (specifically barbie's friend, 'Midge') with a removable pregnancy stomach and babies of assort ethnic origin, I wanted very much. Although when I got it I was irritated by the fact that the stomach only imitated late stages of pregnancy, something which I worked around by using small amounts of tissue leading up to the end of their pregnancy when the stomach would be appropriate.

A very popular game amongst my group of friends in primary school was to play 'Buffy', where we would all be characters from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and fun times would ensue. I was always Giles, and I would get annoyed with the other kids because they would want to be characters that didn't co-occur together within the timeline of the show - for instance one friend would want to be Faith as a vampire slayer, and another Kenya as a slayer, and while Faith sans powers and slayer Kenya could exist, slayer - slayer couldn't because it was Kenya's death that meant Faith becoming the slayer. Also, I would memories chucks of dialogue and even whole episodes to act out, but the other kids wanted to make up their own dialogue. I didn't see the fun in that.

By far my favourite activity as a child was to watch other people play video games. I would irritate my brother trying to watch him play Tony Hawks, or Rayman.

But I don't know if that's a significant deficit in imaginative play.

This question comes up from time-to-time.

The common answer seems to be that most, not all, were very good at imaginative play, especially since many of them didn't have many friends and lived in a world all their own. This was certainly true with me.

That said, "imagination" in this sense, I believe, refers not to "playing pretend," but rather SOCIAL IMAGINATION, or being good predictors of how other humans will act, or should act, based on common understanding of human behavior.

So when they say children with Asperger's have poor imagination, they're referring to SOCIAL IMAGINATION.

All of this - same here.