Speaking as someone on the spectrum myself, I think DROD could actually have some educational potential--and I don't mean in the way DROD RPG is basically one big math problem about optimization. ;P
Its turn-by-turn, cause-and-effect nature could be useful for teaching such things that "
X causes Y"
or the likes. You could hypothetically make a whole dang calculator in DROD if given enough time--with NPCs and Variables alone, you can pretty easily replicate such a task, I'd wager. In fact, DROD's NPC scripting is practically an entire coding language on its own; with a very obvious output system, at that, so you could program all sorts of things!
Though, I think that its more useful in potential science applications over mathematical stuff; given everything in DROD follows certain rules, you effectively have the ability to create all sorts of simulations in it; stuff like Conway's Game of Life to Langton's Ant comes to mind. (Honestly, a bit surprised nobody's made either of these in DROD yet to my knowledge--if anyone has, please lemme know, I'm curious!) I think that, if given the know-how and enough time, you could theoretically create a whole chemistry simulator, or maybe even a rocket trajectory simulator. Basically, DROD's NPC scripting allows for DROD to, essentially, become an entire turn-by-turn simulator of just about anything, and in a way that's relatively simple to code! ...If given enough time, that is.
DROD also has potential for pixel art (in the minimap) which can be used to potentially make diagrams; heck, even with the actual room assets, you could easily represent concepts as well, and with scrolls, you could even annotate them. The only downside is, in the case of the minimap, colors are quite limited; for example, I don't think we have any explicitly purple elements, only a light pink element with trapdoors. So while DROD is more than likely easily Turing compatible, it isn't ROY G. BIV compatible, which is a heckuva sentence.
The only thing I think could be an explicit problem and not just a nitpick is the fact that DROD has blood particles; even though DROD is VERY cartoonish in how it handles blood (with a stock "
splat!"
folly sound and red dot particles jumping all over the place as "
blood"
), I can see academic institutions holding an issue with this. Still, since DROD has an open source, modding the game to remove this wouldn't be out of the question, and coding in a "
no blood"
setting would be utterly trivial--alleviating the problem altogether. In addition, in some cases, its turn-by-turn nature could be a problem for some simulations, as nothing happens if the player does nothing; however, one could easily make a bot that auto-advances the game if a player doesn't do an input, so again, I don't see this being an explicit issue, more a nuisance.
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