Today, Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston reflects on what learning more about their neurotype has taught them about gaming and queerness. Last year, following a period of burnout and a lot of conversations with neurodivergent friends and loved ones, I began the process of seeking a diagnosis for autism.
It feels right to discuss this publicly for the first time in the context of a Eurogamer Pride Week piece. My queerness, my neurotype, and my love of gaming are intimately connected in ways that I'm finally in a position to make sense of and to celebrate, and Eurogamer and the community it has fostered have played an important part in that journey.
In sharing my experiences like this, I'm not aiming to make a one-size-fits-all statement about autism and its relationship to queerness or gaming — as the saying goes, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person — and I'm conscious that, as a white, able-bodied, university-educated person with low support needs, my experience of neurodivergence is informed by a great deal of privilege. Instead, I want to offer some personal reflections on what learning more about my neurotype has taught me about gaming and queerness, and how embracing the queerer side of gaming has helped me to embrace my autism.
Expect some info-dumping! Autism and queerness have an entwined history. It is also because some of the most prominent and traumatising "treatments" for autism, particularly Applied Behavioural Analysis ABA programmes, were developed in close conversation with "conversion therapy" practices that seek to "correct" gender non-conformity and other forms of queerness through punishment and coercion.
Amazing work has been done by disabled scholars, activists, and community organisers to chart this history, and to expose and challenge the ways that compulsory heterosexuality , compulsory able-bodiedness , and compulsory able-mindedness serve to reinforce one another to the detriment of everyone in society.
