Video Games as a Form of Therapeutic Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

The use of video games as a therapeutic intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has steadily increased over the past years. Children with ASD tend to show a great interest in and affinity for playing video games for leisure. This chapter explores how researchers have sought to determine if this inherent motivation could be utilized to assist children with autism spectrum disorders in increasing beneficial skills needed for daily life. Video games have, therefore, been used to assist these children in improving social competence for communicative purposes, improve executive functioning skills, and increase a variety of personal performance skills. Although the variety of research studies in this subject area is expanding, there continues to be a lack of empirical research in this area, and small sample numbers of participants in the majority of the existing research. A lack of longitudinal studies, moreover, is problematic as the studies cannot demonstrate if a learned and mastered skill on a video game can carryover and transfer from the video gaming setting to everyday activities.