I tried to make a game with Commodore-64’s BASIC when I was 10.
It didn’t work. I still occassionally wonder why.
I’d urge you to think long and hard about this. Your son has Asperger’s Syndrome which is characterised by exceedingly poor social skills, so do you really want to encourage him to do something that is usually done alone? I’d suggest that you steer your son to more social activities, like actually playing paper and pencil RPGs - like Dungeons & Dragons - with friends, though I’ll punt and say he has none or very few - but it’s a great way to make friends.
He does play with friends (neighbor kids) almost every day after school. He has friends in school, too.
He also spends time alone doing what he likes to do - playing games. He has a vivid imagination and many ideas for the games he would like to create. I can’t see that it would be harmful for him to have both things in his life - I’m not suggesting that he would do only one or the other.
Creating a game, especially one that resembles anything made during his lifetime, is an enormous task if you have no programming experience. He will have to learn some programming basics and that will take a while. I hope he has realistic expectations about that.
Another question is, which programming language should he learn?
I don’t really know the answer. Many here suggested BASIC. Are you sure? I mean, once upon a time it was the de-facto standard for amateur programming, because it came with just about every home computer or PC, but I think the arguments in favour of BASIC are not that obvious today.
That’s what I was trying to get at. There have been several good options for creating games from an already-programmed toolset–we’ve mentioned NeverWinter Nights, RPG Maker, and Game Maker. There are plenty of tools out there if you want to make things like maps for FPS games. You don’t need to know how to program the toolsets, just how to use them (and do some occasional scripting.) So if, for example, he has the idea for a story he wants to tell, or a great idea for a game, and it fits in these toolsets, then that’s the way to go. If he wants to learn how to program, and thinks that programming games is a good way to learn/good job to have, the thing to do is to work on easier languages and make small games at first, with the understanding that it is basically impossible for one person to make a game like the ones sold today.
DarkBasic, the game develoment environment that I recommended, is specifically built to create games. As a professional developer who has programmed games in DirectX (and earlier in WinG) with C++, I was impressed with both the ease of development and the power that DarkBasic provides. I have a client that wants a “give-away game” developed for advertising and I am thinking about using DarkBasic to do so.