Autism

Does the usage of "Autism," "Autist," etc IC cause anyone notable immersion-breaking? Especially when it's used in the modern-day meme culture kind of context?

Is calling someone an "Autist" IC comparable to the usage of slang like "Dude," in the context of being unthemely?

It hasn't been so bad lately, but there were many times in the past where I wondered if the overuse of "Autism," and "Autist," as slang from the present day would stand out like a sore thumb against a theme and community that has develolped a wide variety of Cyberpunk slang to keep the immersion up.

What are people's opinions on this? Has anyone noticed feedback from Staff to try to use more theme friendly slang instead of "Autist" and "Autism?"

I don't really like it, but I'm hoping to mostly learn about other people's feelings on this, rather than convince others of my own viewpoint.

I think “Blank” was kind of a forced attempt st trying to derail autism speak because people were not so much feeling immersion broken but offended personally. I believe it’s intended use is also to be derogatory towards people without nanotechnology that enhances your brain. It’s just not that catchy, and really lacks an “oomph” when you are wishing to insult someone I guess. I don’t consider someone using the word autist or autism immersion breaking personally because autism is a real thing. There have even been people playing autistic characters. Are those characters immersion breaking?

I think what’s more immersion breaking and way more commonly seen then the occasional jab at someones intelligence is the use of foreign language in place of English on SIC, in conversation when your character has no language skill, casually discussing stats like tangible objects, shitting yourself and acting like it ain’t no thang or your chins continuing to just sit with you, walking off mortally wounded and no-selling it, and a hundred other things I could rant about.

I think if you want better slang for autism, try inserting it. If it is catchy enough it might pick up and replace it. I personally only find kromag to be catchy over blank, but someone else might find blank rolls off of the tongue easier.

Also, I feel like I should say that I don’t mean any offense to autistic people when suggesting they be called blanks or kromags or Autists.

I'm just here to fight that 'dude' isnt immersion breaking, anyone wanna go meet me at the bike racks?

Thank you everyone for your replies. Several things were brought up which I hadn't considered.

Thank you for pointing out that there is some slang already floating around that could be used as a creative replacements. And I'm glad it was brought to my attention that there's the possibility of offending, hurting, or making anyone feel attacked to a certain degree. I hadn't considered that, and was purely looking at things from the standpoint of "Is this immersion-breaking?" Thank you for pointing that out to me as well.

Grizzly: "There have even been people playing autistic characters. Are those characters immersion breaking?" That's not a good comparison to what I was originally pointing out. It's about word choice, context, and word usage mostly. I was referring to "autism," "autist," etc being used specifically as insults in the modern-day context. For example, "Gay," as an insult does not hold up in the world of Sindome because the only real social issues are class-related. "Don't be gay, baka," can be a weird, potentially immersion-breaking line of dialogue, while gay characters are not at all immersion breaking. If a bartender was complaining to her friend about customers trying to stiff her on their tabs, and her friend replied with "Aw, that's gay," I feel like more often than not the bartender would be ridiculously confused.

Jameson: I have reason to believe that members of staff do consider "Dude" old-timey enough to be immersion-breaking. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure over-use of "Dude" would be looked at as kind of weird, and from what I can tell we want to avoid that kind of weird. From what I understand, it's preferred for us to be the kind of weird that's more like worshiping Corporations as deities, or vilifying them as literal incarnations of demons and devils.

There are a decent amount of places on the internet (youtube, reddit, etc), where "autism," and "autist," and such are used as insults. It was my belief that seeing characters on Sindome using those terms in the same context and intent as the modern-day equivalent is immersion breaking. But after considering the posts in this thread, I've realized that just because I personally see it a lot and subject myself to those awful communities, does not mean it's an issue for anyone else. Although I do believe there is certainly room for creative conjecture on how things would be in the future, like maybe a more normalized view of neurodivergence, even just being absorbed into other slang like "baka" or something.

If we need a linguistic sidebar in a new thread over in Theme about my subjective immersed reasons for having a particular character use dude a lot, and she did without being reprimanded, I'm down. I'm only half kidding. :) Withmore is Cali son!

Seriously though, immersion is a tricky and very subjective thing. Like I've said before when people get pissy about slang, I'd rather people cultivate things that give flavor to their character and roleplay -- while yes remaining themely -- rather than literally everybody using the same two words, bakakbakbakbakbakbaka, because they're CP stamped in a help file somewhere, that DOES break my immersion.

Showcase a region, heritage, background. Slang gets added to, it evolves, it doesnt dissappear in a few decades. Especially insult slang. And pronoun slang sticks around foreverrrrr.

So there's two things to this:

One, thanks to Sindome's different history there never was a time period where extended research and normalization of the autism spectrum happened. By that the last proper advancement in the field was the addition of its diagnostics in the DSM-3, DSM-3-R and ICD-10.

"In the ICD-10 version the diagnosis of autism is made on the basis of four features: (A) a characteristic onset before age 3 defined by delayed or deviant communication, social interaction, and/or play (3 criteria), (B) qualitative impairments in reciprocal social interaction (5 criteria), (C) qualitative

impairments in communication (5 criteria), and (D) restricted and stereotyped

patterns of behavior, interests, and activities (6 criteria). To achieve

a diagnosis of autism an individual must exhibit one criterion from group

A, at least three from group B, and at least two each from groups C and

D. By definition ICD-10 excludes individuals with other forms of pervasive

developmental disorder (i.e,, Rett syndrome, Asperger syndrome, Disintegrative

Disorder), attachment disorders, schizophrenia, specific developmental

language disorder with secondary socio-emotional problems, and

mental retardation with association emotional/behavioral disorder from the

diagnosis of autism. It should be noted that ICD-10 differs from both DSMIII

and DSM-III-R in its inclusion of a number of "nonautistic" pervasive

developmental disorders." (a quote from the book "Three Diagnostic Systems for Autism: DSM-III, DSM-III-R, and ICD-101" by Volkmar in 1992)

So unless continued development, or potentially even the necessary developments for the autism spectrum to appear, is added to the Lore the important question is, what chum apart from a history freak that reads books from before 2000 knows the term "autist"? Without the attempts at normalization the term itself never got the publicity it had in our world. Using it as an insult makes just as much sense as insulting someone as a "Borderliner", or any other psychological illness that did not experience the same levels of normalization in our world.

Secondly, the current stance is that the autism spectrum itself has both psychological and genetic origins, with the more commonly known Asperger syndrome being considered to be purely genetic. In the world of Sindome these can either be fixed with bio tech, or might even be intended. Corporations, just like some companies (for example SAP) in our world, would be making use of the specific differences between Autists and normal people. These differences are profitable enough that it wouldn't be too crazy to forcibly induce a lighter/improved version of the Asperger syndrome.