How can we use Minecraft to helpchildren with autism.

My name is Stuart Duncan, but I'm actually better known online as "the Father of Autism." That's how I look online. I know it's hard to relate to that image online.

One game I'm going to talk about today is called Minecraft. This is how I look in this game. If you don't know much about the game, that's fine. It's just a platform that I use to meet specific needs, and what I want to talk about today is universal.

About four years ago, I created a Minecraft server designed to help autistic children and their families, hence what I call the Autcraft. Since then, our story has appeared in news reports, TV, radio and magazines around the world. Buzzfeed calls our platform one of the "promised lands of the Internet." There is an award-winning research paper on this project called "Minecraft: Computer-aided Technology for Children with Autism." The title sounds a bit convoluted, but I think you can guess the general idea of the paper. So, I want to talk about this paper and the issues that it addresses. But before we do that, let me give you some background -- how the Atucraft server was set up.

In 2013, Minecraft was all over the Internet, playing for children and adults alike, with or without autism. But autism is a serious issue. I've seen parents of autistic children contact parents with similar experiences on social media platforms to ask if their children can play together, because when their children play games on public servers, they always encounter bullies and malicious people. Because if you have autism, sometimes your behavior is a little bit abnormal, sometimes it's completely different from other people.

As we all know, for a bully, just a little bit of difference is enough to make you his next victim. As a result, malicious people on the Internet deliberately destroy what autistic children are trying to build in games, steal their props, and even attack and kill their characters again and again, making it impossible for autistic children to continue playing. But the worst and most hurtful thing about these online bullies is that they tell these autistic children that they are abandoned, defective, or mentally retarded. They even tell children as young as six that society loathes them, that their parents will never love a disabled child, and that they should take their own lives.

As you can imagine, these autistic children would be very angry, sad to quit the server. They'll smash the keyboard or even say they hate themselves, and their parents can't do anything about it.

So I decided to try to help these children and families. I have autism, my eldest son has autism, and my kids and I love minecraft. So, I have to do something to change that.

So I built my own Minecraft server, and I spent some time building a small village with roads through it, a huge welcome sign and a hilltop castle to make it more attractive. My idea is very simple. I have a whitelist that players can only join with my permission. So I try to monitor the use of servers as much as possible to make sure that no bad things happen. This is my intention, and this is my commitment: to keep my children safe so they can enjoy the fun of the game.