You Couldn’t Have Done That is a short Twine game in which you take on the role of a high schooler starting her first job at a mall store. You’re nervous, like anyone would be going into the workforce for the first time. You’re also autistic, though, and that stacks additional challenges onto the experience. Not only that, you’ll find yourself having to deal with a situation that nobody ever wants to find themselves in, autistic or not.
I decided to play You Couldn’t Have Done That because I’m currently reading Elizabeth Moon’s Nebula-winner The Speed of Dark, which has an autistic man as the main character. I thought it would be interesting to compare the two. Lou, the protagonist of Moon’s novel, spends a lot of time pondering the differences between himself and people who are not autistic, whether “normal” behavior is just whatever the majority does rather than something intrinsic, and how much he wants to be like everyone else versus how much he likes the way he is.
You Couldn’t Have Done That has a different focus. It’s more about how a specific autistic person experiences a few traumatic events rather than a general exploration of what it means to be autistic in a society of “normal” people. There are similarities, though: Like Lou in The Speed of Dark, Theo in You Couldn’t Have Done That is more aware of sounds, has more anxiety about interacting with other people, and enjoys repetitive activities more than most of us do. Taken together, the two works have helped me grasp better what life is like when you’re autistic.
One of the ways in which You Couldn’t Have Done That assists the player in understanding autism is signified in its title: Sometimes the game presents you an option that it doesn’t actually allow you to act on, instead telling you that as an autistic person “You couldn’t have done that.” I mostly found this effective in dramatizing the differences between an autistic person’s response and the response of a person without autism. The mechanic is particularly powerful during the traumatic events near the end of the game, where you want to extricate yourself from a bad situation but find yourself partially stymied by your autism. However, there was one place in the game for which my inability to choose an option didn’t ring true to me. Near the beginning I tried to flee the mall instead of starting my new job, and the game told me that I couldn’t have done that because it would have disappointed my mother. I may be quite wrong here, given my lack of knowledge of autism, but that doesn’t seem like an autistic’s response. But that was the only place in the game in which the lack of choice felt false.
I do think You Couldn’t Have Done That would be stronger if it were half again or even twice as long. A longer game would allow those of us with less experience of autism to settle more into what it’s like to be autistic before being faced with the trauma of the game’s climax.
Overall, though, I think You Couldn’t Have Done That is effective at what it’s trying to do. It does convey some of the experience of autism, especially how autism affects your responses if you find yourself being taken advantage of. The game is well worth its fifteen-minute play time.
(Also, if you liked You Couldn’t Have Done That, you might enjoy Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark.)
An Exercise for the Reader 