Video Games Aren't A Waste of Time—They Were Built for Our Brains

Five types of games that were made for neurodivergent people

“Video games are a waste of time.”

If you grew up as a gamer, how often did you hear that from a parent, an elder sibling or even your peers?

I’d wager you heard it a fair amount. At least, I did.

Sure, you’d get the console and a few games as a concession at Christmas or whatever, but there’d be an implied shelf life on video games as a hobby in general. You’ll eventually stop asking for the next Mario Kart or FIFA for your birthday and you’ll start wanting CDs or trainers—you know, like normal teenagers do.

But for many neurodivergent people, like myself, video games weren’t just a distraction we dipped into after school for a few moments before dinner. They were an escape—away from a world we didn’t fully understand, and into one we could.

I think the first video game I ever played was when I was about six—and it was far from age appropriate. It was Doom II on the PC/MS-DOS. I was a bit scared of all the pixelated demon-type creatures that appeared in each level, but I soldiered through with a determined fascination. The feeling of making it to the end of each level released a sense of satisfaction within me that nothing else at the time was—and not much else ever has.

Thirty years on, and my love for video games is perhaps bigger than ever before. My Steam library is full of hundreds of games unplayed—worlds unexplored, experiences yet to be felt. If only I could put them on a shelf and sit in front of it for Zoom calls to make myself look smart.

Despite having so many untouched games, over the years I have actually played quite a few—and even finished some, too. I’ve been thinking about which types of games—not necessarily genres—do the most for neurodivergent brains; the ones that really get us hooked, let us dive deep, and ultimately meet our brains where they are, with what they need.

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Games with Deep Lore

It’s so frustrating when I’m watching a film or TV show, and I get interested in a particular character, or past event, or location. I want to know more. I pull out my laptop of phone to search for more information…and nothing. My request to go deeper has been denied. What’s on the screen is all you’re getting, sorry.

So imagine how my heart sings when I get hold of a game that not only captures my attention so much that I want to dive deeper into the world, but it actually holds my hand and shows me to the diving board.

Games that tell you everything about each planet you pass by, keep a record of every creature you slay, or tell you the full story behind each character you meet, are built for monotropic minds.

Anyone can feel satisfied when you finish the mission on Tuchanka in Mass Effect 3, for instance. But only those who’ve fully invested themselves in the Mass Effect universe lore will understand the gravity of the decision you make to end the genophage—a devastating biological weapon created by the Salarians to suppress the Krogan population—or not. Because those who’ve absorbed the hundreds of years of lore and history on the subject whilst playing the game know that it’s a far more complex decision than it would appear at face value—and therefore whatever they decide will be ultimately that much more poignant either way.

Mass Effect 3

In these kind of games, you’re rewarded for your intrigue and desire for more meaning behind everything you’re doing in the game you’re playing—with a more meaningful experience overall.

These games are often open world RPGs, which allow you take on an entirely new persona (or create your own), and fully invest in role-playing that character, again making for a deeper more nuanced experience that suits our brains. They also often have a large world to explore and plenty of side characters and missions to undertake, making for dozens of hours of extra gameplay available, again rewarding your instinct to go further into the game than others (and also not making you feel bad about getting distracted from the main story—but actually applauding you for it).

My recommendations: Mass Effect, Elden Ring, The Witcher, Elder Scrolls, Baldur’s Gate 3

Puzzle Games

On the opposite end of the scale from games that have unlimited possibilities and so much content to explore lie a genre of games that have one problem, and one solution: puzzle games.

Sometimes the security and knowledge that there’s a single mission in front of you—and a clear unambiguous parameter for success—is the peace of mind you need going into a gaming experience, as well as a stimulating challenge that genuinely rewards the processing effort you put into it.

This is the genre of game where a neurodivergent’s skill at recognising patterns truly comes into its own. Not only will someone adept at picking them up excel at a game like this, but they’ll actually feel feedback from the game as the puzzle is solved or the next level is unlocked as a result of that pattern recognition. As if the game whispers “Yes, you were right”—feedback that we rarely get for employing similar skills in the outside world.

There’s a reason why Tetris is the best-selling video game of all time, and Candy Crush continues to dominate mobile downloads—because gamers, neurodivergent or not, crave having one simple problem put in front of them, with one clear solution. All you need is the skill to put the two together.

Not all puzzle games are as simple as those though—for people wanting to get their teeth into deeper mysteries, there are a couple that will truly swallow you up, and actually start showing off some deep lore of their own—and open up stories that the first category of games I mentioned would be jealous of.

Blue Prince

I filled up half a notebook that I bought with the naïve notion that I’d get organised with it, by making copious notes whilst playing Blue Prince—a puzzle game from last year that came out to rave reviews, where you have to navigate an inherited manor's shifting rooms to locate a hidden 46th room, uncovering deep family secrets and political intrigue along the way. I made it to Room 46 before my mind wandered to something else, but I was far from finished unearthing every secret in that manor.

And a game that I truly wish I could erase my mind to replay— Return of the Obra Dinn— truly fits into this deeper-level of puzzle games as well. You play as an insurance investigator-turned-detective who is responsible for discovering the fates of all sixty crew of an abandoned ship. There are not many games that have sent me down the rabbit hole as far as this—and probably none that left me with quite as big a feeling of accomplishment when I finally cracked the puzzle.

My recommendations: Return of the Obra Dinn, Blue Prince, The Room, Disco Elysium, Portal 1 and 2

Life Sims

Really when I say Life Sims, I’m kind of only really talking about one game (or am I?).

I’d played quite a cross-section of video games in my early years on various platforms, but I can safely say that The Sims was my first true video game obsession.

Created as a spin-off from the popular city-builder Sim City(more on that later), The Sims allows you to create virtual people (guess what the games calls them?), build them a house, furnish it…and then live. They get jobs, they go to work, they hang out with friends and maybe get romantically involved with their neighbours—you know, everyday stuff.

It probably shouldn’t have worked as a concept, but it really did—and it hooked me completely.

I still remember being completely obsessed with the original for PC, and waiting for the expansion packs to come out. The excitement I felt for The Sims: Hot Date to release was only matched by my utter crushing disappointment when I realised my family PC didn’t have the required (wait for it) 64MB of RAM to run the game.

In a world that constantly didn’t make sense to me…this one did. I built a home, relationships and a life for my little Sims that I had complete control over—I decided if they went to the toilet or wet themselves. I decided if they were going to go to work or take a day off to practice their charisma in the bathroom mirror. I decided if a tough budgeting decision had to be made and that in fact yes, we were going to have to sell the pool ladder whilst the neighbour was still swimming in there. Sorry not sorry.

The Sims

Sure, not everything was completely predictable. One minute you’d be cooking breakfast, and the next minute your cooker was on fire. You could get bitten by your hamster and spread a deadly virus to everyone in the house. And the music that triggers when a burglar unexpectedly shows up at your house will stick with me forever (if you know, you know).

Some people might not even un-pause the clock, because house building and decorating is such a huge facet of this game, and opens up a whole new outlet of creativity that neurodivergent minds love.

My recommendations: The Sims…but that’s not all

There’s a new player on the block in the Life Sim market called Paralives. It’s early access and only on PC right now, but it’s looking promising and has been getting great reviews from long-time players of The Sims. It’s only a matter of time before I bite the bullet and dive into this one.

Logistics and Resource Management Games

You want a game to completely take over your life, and leave you doing mathematical equations in your sleep? Then look no further.

There’s an element of resource management in a lot of video games. When you were playing Pokemon Red back in the 90s and you saved your Ultra Balls for better wild Pokemon, or you didn’t use a Full Restore you’d found in a cave until a really tough gym leader battle—that was resource management.

Keeping on top of everything in your inventory—and categorising it, if you’re anything like me—is the gateway into the kind of simulation management games that will very very easily erode all your free time.

My entry point into these types of games was SimCity 3000— I saw a friend playing it once and was spellbound by just how many menus and options and panels and numbers and dials and buttons were on the screen all at once, and how many more were hidden away, waiting to be explored and tinkered with. Getting it and playing it myself only deepened my fascination.

Of course anyone can enjoy these types of games where you manage a budget and approval ratings and other metrics, to a certain degree. But what’s “good enough” for most brains will just not do for many of ours.

I saw this in myself more and more as I progressed over time through city building games and ended up with Cities: Skylines ten years ago or so. It wasn’t enough just to build a nice town with houses, shops and places to work—I had to know that the road layout in this place made sense so that no one got stuck in traffic unnecessarily, which would back up roads and affect public services, force people to move away and ultimately bankrupt me. I meticulously laid water pipes under the roads so they covered the maximum amount of area for the minimum expenditure. I once spent two hours in this game building a cycle path. One cycle path—just so it was perfectly efficient and had the maximum impact on reducing traffic in the neighbourhood.

But when you create a perfect network or system in these types of games…oof, nothing feels better. To see your vision for exactly how a traffic system is going to work actually happen on screen—albeit with a few tweaks of issues you didn’t foresee the first time around—is where these games tickle the neurodivergent synapses the most.

A game that takes the logistical element of this category to another level is Satisfactory—a game where you essentially mine a distant planet of its resources and build factories to smelt, craft and build things out of them.

Satisfactory

It eases you in by giving you a chisel, a rock and a crafting table. You start doing it yourself and you think “yeah, this is fine…but there must be a more efficient way".

That is the first time you’ll use the word “efficient” whilst playing—and nowhere near the last.

Sooner or later you’ll get hold of conveyor belts and machines that do the transportation and crafting for you. Once you set up your first conveyor and watch as a mining machine pulls resources out of the ground, and the resource ratios and conveyor speeds that you’ve calculated result in all your machines pumping out with 100% efficiency, you’re lost to this game. It has you. You are Satisfactory now. Enjoy.

Thinking out the logistical issues you get in-game and solving them yourself; seeing the visible progress as your factory grows and grows; noticing the progress from when you just built a bunch of spaghetti conveyor belts to watching the majesty of your ultra-efficient belt loops: there’s so much in Satisfactory— and many other games in this category—for neurodivergent minds to get stuck into, that actually rewards how we think about and interact with them.

My recommendations: Satisfactory, Cities: Skylines, Factorio, Stellaris

A Wild Fifth Category Appears!

The four categories above are so different in many aspects, and yet are the same in so many more. This duality highlights something I’ve been skirting around up until now:

Any game can become the game for a neurodivergent mind.

The monotropic mind wants what the monotropic mind wants—and that’s that. We don’t care about a game’s genre, skill requirement, objective quality or anything else. If something in that game exists that hooks us deep, we’re in it for the long haul.

For some, this can mean that one game dominates your whole life and nothing else ever gets a look-in—or it could be that gaming is like a giant buffet and you just have to sample anything and everything.

I’m kind of in between the two—my Steam library is bulging with dozens of games I’ve picked up in sales but not played yet. A lot of games I picked up on a whim, enjoyed for a while then set aside.

A select few— Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption II, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dave the Diver, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, No Man’s Sky, Satisfactory, Cities: Skylines, Crusader Kings 3 and Kerbal Space Program to name just a few—have grabbed me over the years and absorbed me for hundreds of hours at a time.

But there’s one that defeats them all, in terms of hours spent and emotional investment. I’ve mentioned it before here—it’s Football Manager.

The joke of it is that I’m not what you’d describe as a completely die-hard football fan. Yes, I’m massively into the World Cup right now, but that’s a whole other obsession in itself. Yes, I keep up with the Premier League and follow my local team…but honestly, most of my fandom of football has come from things around the game—Fantasy Premier League, fixations on major international tournaments…and chief amongst them is Football Manager.

Without going into a whole essay within an essay about the game itself, the depth and granularity with which you can control every aspect of your club is exactly the reason why I have well over 10,000 hours logged on Football Manager games dating back to 2005.

It always fascinates me when I speak to people I know who play video games—and I don’t use the word “gamer” there deliberately. Because these people speak about games in terms of just completing it—like their main goal is just to get to the end credits as quickly as possible and toss the game aside. How can you be presented with something that offers so much depth, explorations, possibilities and hidden meaning…just to ignore it all? The neurodivergent gamer explores the desire trails wandering off the paved path that most players just don’t see.

I described video games as an escape at the beginning—and in isolation that undersells what they can do for neurodivergent people.

Video games present experiences that are, I believe, engineered for our brains like no other entertainment medium is. They give us the things our brains don’t get as often in the outside world, or in TV, films, and sometimes even books—clarity, control, defined rules and expectations, chartable progress, and ultimately, a world where the way we think is not a limitation, but the secret to success.