Penguin Pebbling — A Game of Creating Belonging, Building Connection and Understanding Autistic Identity was developed by Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms & Ryan Boren at Stimpunks (2026), grounded in the Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions coined by Amythest Schaber (Neurowonderful) and documented by Stimpunks Foundation (2022). The penguin pebbling locution draws on Helen Edgar’s writing at Autistic Realms (Edgar, 2023), framed through Milton’s Double Empathy Problem (2012) and monotropism theory (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005). Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: free to use, share and adapt for non-commercial purposes, with credit, a link back, and the same licence on anything built from it.
A Note for Therapists, Educators, and Practitioners
If you are using Penguin Pebbling: A Game of Creating Belonging, Building Connection and Understanding Autistic Identity in a therapeutic, educational, or professional setting — a clinic, a classroom, a support group, a training — we warmly invite you to consider purchasing a printable PDF card set from the Autistic Realms Shop or making a donation to support our work.
Autistic Realms and Stimpunks are community-led initiatives. Everything we create is grounded in lived experience and made freely available because we believe access matters. Your support helps us keep creating resources like this one — for individuals, families, educators, and communities who need them.
Read the guide for practitioners
Thank you for using this resource with care and for crediting the community it came from.
About This Game
Penguin Pebbling: A Game of Creating Belonging, Building Connection and Understanding your Autistic Identity was developed by Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms & Ryan Boren at Stimpunks (2026).
It is grounded in the Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions originally coined by Amythest Schaber (Neurowonderful) and documented by Stimpunks Foundation (2022). The penguin pebbling locution draws on Helen Edgar’s earlier writing at Autistic Realms (Edgar, 2023), framed through Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem (2012) and monotropism theory (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005).
The game is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to use, share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes. Please credit Helen Edgar, Autistic Realms & Ryan Boren, Stimpunks, and link back to penguinpebbling.app. If you adapt it — translate it, re-set it, build a version for your own setting — please share that under the same licence.
This is the licence the game has always described in words, written down. It does not change what was already allowed; it answers the one question the sentence left open, which is what happens to something built on top of it, and it gives a school, clinic or publisher a licence their own lawyers already recognise. Buying the deck or donating through the Autistic Realms shop is unaffected: non-commercial binds people using the game, not Helen and Ryan publishing it.
References
Edgar, H. (2023). Penguin pebbling: An Autistic love language. Autistic Realms. https://autisticrealms.com/penguin-pebbling-an-autistic-love-language/
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Stimpunks Foundation. (2022). The five neurodivergent love locutions. https://stimpunks.org/2022/01/22/the-five-neurodivergent-love-languages-2/