Pretense Awareness Context and Autism: Insights from Conversation Analysis.

Breland (2022) watched autistic and neurotypical adults play tabletop role-play games.

The author used conversation analysis to see how players kept pretend talk separate from real talk.

These games have three layers: the story world, rules talk, and player chat.

Autistic players often mixed the layers.

They broke the shared pretend frame that neurotypical gamers held steady.

Small cues that mark "this is just play" were missed or used wrong.

Crane et al. (2016) and Sparaci et al. (2015) paved the way.

They showed autistic language looks odd only if you ignore its social job.

Luke extends this idea to play: frame mixing is not rudeness, it is a cue-processing gap.

Malkin et al. (2021) supplies a lab match.

They found asking autistic kids to switch labels halved their success.

Luke sees the same struggle in the wild: switching from "dragon" to dice talk on the fly.

Together the studies say context shifts are hard in both lab and game life.

You can add frame-marking drills to social groups.

Before a role-play, teach clear start and stop signals.

Model phrases like "out of character: my pizza is here."

Praise learners when they use them.

Over time the game itself becomes your data sheet.