User:Thijshijsijsjss/Human Parser/About Functionality

Good to have. Annotation about the term 'high functioning'. The game features a 'functionality score', and the player loses normal control after exceeding this number. This entry should be connected to the manual's part about the functionality score.

Functionality, 1

As the word 'spectrum' suggests, the autistic spectrum comes in a continuous, multi-axial variety of flavors. Luckily, this is much better understood these days. However, I often still see the spectrum being mostly reduced to one axis: 'functioning'. Spending any number of minutes within discourse on autism, people are quick to talk about 'low' and 'high' functioning autistic people. 'Low' and 'high' meaning to indicate how seemingly well an autistic person can function in society. 'Seemingly' being the key word here: it is a measure that is not a property of the person -- it reveals little information about one's traits -- but rather a property of judgement: the degee of functionality reveals the values of an environment, and evaluates the matter in which a person is a disruption to that environment. In that sense, 'functionality' can be a nasty measurement. Of course, there's a wide variety of different challenges people face, and some are more explicit and undeniable and shaping than others. It's good to acknowledge that, but I don't know if measuring 'functionality' is the way to achieve that.

Functionality, 2

Compare 'high functioning' to another term: 'high masking'. This, in my eyes, does reveal more of the person's traits: the matter of masking tells us about someone's ability to sense and adapt to an environment, to blend in and suppress their natural tendencies. Some people might be doing this a lot (voluntarily or not), while others less (voluntarily or not). Moreover, while this metric is often reserved for discourse on autism, it is a metric that, to me, seems more universal. Whereas 'functioning' presupposes a system of values, 'masking' doesn't: it merely states the ability or tendency to mask to blend into an environment, which is not a evaluation of the environment.

Rough rough draft. The thesis has been moving away from explicitly naming the neurodivergent experiences, so that might need to change here. Can connect to spoon theory