ComFiM: A Cooperative Serious Game to Encourage the Development of Communicative Skills between Children with Autism

About 50% of people with autism have problems in developing any kind of functional language. Working with the concept of serious games and with the impairments that children with autism often have in the communication field, this paper presents the development of a game called ComFiM. ComFiM aims to encourage communication between people with autism as an interactive and dynamic process, first building player knowledge while interacting with a virtual character, and later encouraging communication with another human player in a muti-player segment, using the knowledge gained in the single player segment. Results show that aesthetic experiences addressed in ComFiM aligned to a multi-player environment and that the proposed game architecture has been able to create situations of communication between the players.