I am not Bill Gates: The Misleading Economic Myth of the Asperger's Engineer

After finding a desire to have a career in video games less than four years ago, I enrolled in a game development curriculum offered by Becker College in the Fall of 2013. Two and a half years later, I graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and attended the commencement ceremony as a formality around five months later. During that time, I have gained valuable insights in the process of game production, development, and design; I became aware of the various software programs involved in those processes ranging from illustration programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to game development programs such as GameMaker: Studio, Unity, and Unreal. More importantly, I have acquired enough general know-how to make my own games while also exploring additional options that would make some of my ideas possible. My learning experience was and continues to be invaluable but it was not without hurdles that were compounded by my Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism which impairs my abilities to communicate and socialize while also causing me to process information differently from normal people.

Political, Social, and Moral Ideology vs. the Video Game Industry and Community

From top-left to bottom right: Jack Thompson , Leland Yee, Ronnie Lamb, Anita Sarkeesian, and  Joseph Lieberman 

I'll start off by saying I am completely open to diversity in video games. Depending on the quality, I'm willing to play any game made in North America, Japan, Europe, and even Africa. During my years as a gamer, I have enjoyed playing a number of genres, including First-Person Shooters (FPS), Role Playing Games (RPGs), Beat'em-Ups, fighting games, hack-and-slash action, survival horror, platformers, turn-based strategies, real-time strategies, and the occasional point-and-click adventure. In those games, I've played the role of a variety of characters ranging from cyber-enhanced supersoldiers and supernaturally augmented demon hunters to medieval knights and ordinary people in bizarre circumstances. Overall, I've had a blast with them regardless of their gender, race, creed, and nationality. And I'm willing to spend my hard-earned money on more diverse games as long as they are well-made, well-designed, and deemed to be overall fun. In all the time I've spent playing video games, I have never developed any thoughts of committing suicide, sexual assaults, or public shooting sprees in any way; for that matter, my sense of reality and morality has never diminished and never will. Yet, this is exactly what's been implied by over-protective parents, politicians, social scientists, and pop culture critics when they bring video games into the mass media spotlight and propose various forms of legal restrictions, content regulation, and implementing their agenda in the development and production process based mainly on misinformation and cultural bias.