Poll of the Day > Is a major symptom of autism the desire/interest in perfecting things?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Where things are usually very niche hobbies or whatnot?
I was listening to a video, and realized that I really do not like perfecting things, but a lot of gamers get really, really into perfecting things (e.g. speedrunning). I'm not trying to label anyone, I just made a connection between the desire to perfect a task and a common mental condition.

Im a perfectionist and get really stressed out about it, and I suspect I might be on the spectrum, but Ive never been tested or diagnosed.

I posted this thread because I listened to this video:}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLqWU7zG1bQ

Feel like it applies to a lot of things in life, and reflects my experiences in other areas of life (work, other games, ect). The big part here is like, advice you don't want to take isn't good advice. If you don't want to perfect something, then don't.

I suppose its easy to obsess over achievements and stuff, but I dont really care much.

papercup posted...

Im a perfectionist and get really stressed out about it, and I suspect I might be on the spectrum, but Ive never been tested or diagnosed.

Pretty much this for me. Though for most of my early life very few people really talked about autism as a concept, so I've always couched it more in terms of having OCD-ish tendencies.

Though I also tend to be a bit bipolar about it, where I can have moments when I hyperfocus on something and get really perfectionist about it, but then I can also swing the other way and just completely stop giving a shit and halfass whatever I'm doing. It kind of varies based on exactly what I'm doing - I'm much more likely to be perfectionist when I'm working on purely intellectual and creative stuff, and less likely when I'm doing stuff that requires physical effort.

When it comes to games it often manifests for me as a compulsive collecting desire. Whether that's collecting and hoarding items, or recruiting optional characters, or collecting achievements, or going down a checklist for 100% completion, or stuff along those lines. Whereas other forms of "perfection" (speedrunning, no death runs, stealth runs, pacifist runs, optimizing builds, beating ridiculously overpowered optional sidebosses, etc) don't really appeal to me at all.

It can result in fixating unusually on things, which can manifest as perfectionism, but it's far from the only potential cause of perfectionism and perfectionist tendencies generally are not reason to suspect autism on their own.

Well, if you are making a Maslow's style hierarchy about a video game & creating various spreadsheets about it, you may be an autist.