Where Politics And Video Games Collide

As my brother has Asperger's and I am a student of psychology, I kind of feel the need to chime in here. First of all one thing they've got wrong is that a lack of extroversion is a quality of Asperger's. In fact extroversion is one of the main criteria that most psychologists use to distinguish Asperger's from conventional autism, even though the official diagnostic criteria only concern themselves with the difference in language delay and imaginative play.

The full range of Autism Spectrum disorders are developmental disabilities and almost certainly genetic to some degree. However, it appears a wide array of genes contribute to the disorders so it makes sense for there to be people who inherit some of the traits but not others. These people would likely have mild to moderate difficulties with empathy and understanding what other people are thinking and might prefer video games to interacting with other people. Most importantly people with Asperger's seem to love predictability, which video games are much more so than people.

Regardless of all of that, they may be drawing too large a conclusion. While people who are just shy of formal diagnosis of autism or Asperger's
may be very likely to be video game addicts, to expand that to video game addicts as a whole seems to be overreaching.