Why do we play videogames?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question. For a lot of us, videogames exist as a form of entertainment. We seek to exploit and bend game mechanics to our will to have fun, competing both against the game and against others in this push and pull of winning versus losing. For me, I see fun as part of the spectrum of emotions that interactive media can bring out of us; while I’m always down to play video games for enjoyment, I’ve also been a bit of a believer that videogames can coexist alongside this tried-and-true definition as a medium that’s just as capable of bringing out an entire range of emotions like sorrow, anxiety, and tension, alongside the joy of playing games. And so, it was in that kind of mood that one day, I was browsing the Steam store for indie games, scouring for the newest exploratory story-rich game present as a particular species of “art game,” “games for change,” “social impact games,” or whatever term you want to use for that strain of indie games that tries to tell a story via integration of game mechanics and narrative that focuses less on big budget production and more on the construction and deconstruction of everything else going into it.

Enter That Dragon, Cancer. I’ve known about this title for at least five, maybe six years now, but never got around to it; perhaps I felt as if I wasn’t in the right mood, the right setting, hadn’t done the proper amount of preparation to really get everything out of the game. And honestly, nothing could have ever prepared me for it. No amount of playing What Remains of Edith Finch or Spiritfarer or even Rakuen alongside anything marked as a “tearjerker” or under the “Emotional” tag on Steam could have left me ready to tackle the heavy subjects presented in That Dragon, Cancer, an experience which the Steam Store page sums up as “An immersive, narrative videogame that retells Joel Green’s 4-year fight against cancer through about two hours of poetic, imaginative gameplay that explores themes of faith, hope and love.” It is the most undisguised game I have perhaps ever experienced, a game that is so unapologetically personal and close to the heart in memorializing a lost family member that I felt guilty at times intruding upon the scenes and memories written into the engine. And it did so in a way that I honestly cannot say many other games have attempted, much less done well.

Most games in this genre utilize a variety of (often thinly) veiled narrative metaphors to portray morals and tragedy alongside gameplay, embedded character backgrounds and world-building to provoke thoughts and emotions among the players; they don’t necessarily market themselves as games that are meant to spin yarns of melancholy and despair, but they have that sort of “feel” to them where you can tell that in many cases, a once joyous and brightly colored tale is headed in that general direction. I don’t think That Dragon, Cancer is anything like that; it is extremely upfront about its content and its intentions. Reading the description on the store page, it states, "This is where we go to remember our son Joel, up through here along this path. We want to show you who he was, and how his life changed us. Can we walk here together for a while?" There are no illusions of what lies at the end of the tunnel; you know how the game ends. Quite literally, what you see is what you get; this all actually happened, and the game becomes that much more emotionally raw because of that. It presents itself as a point and click adventure game with sporadic videogame gameplay elements and references scattered throughout (controlled very simply as there’s only one instance that actually requires use of the keyboard), serving to highlight the seemingly mundane in Joel Green’s five-year life as the valuable memories that construct his story. And make no mistake; this is a “video game,” just stripped down to its bare essentials. The medium’s elements are there to both emphasize the metaphors that convey the Green family’s struggle and at the same time, cleverly impart and evoke emotions by twisting your perception of what the game mechanics mean to the player regarding agency and perspective.

I’ll address one of the elephants in the room at this time; there are a lot of complaints scattered across the internet about how the gameplay is unfulfilling, or “unfun,” or how it’s a “bad video game” and shouldn’t be classified as a video game. Well… yeah, that is the point. Ryan Green has stated that it would defeat the purpose of the game if the tale of his family tending to Joel’s cancer treatment was considered fun. The closest comparison that I could make here would be to Phil Elverum’s album A Crow Looked At Me, written in the wake of his wife’s passing and focusing on brutally honest and unflinching diary-like lyricism with more muted musicality, and even this is an oversimplification. What Ryan Green sought to bring out of the medium was, rather, evoking a variety of emotions as you closely follow Joel’s journey. His answer to the “game” aspect is this: "I would say, 'No, it's not a game, but there are games in it… [a]nd it's not about fun. But there are moments when you have fun. And life is a mixture of the sorrowful and the joyful and weeping and playing and praying, and so I hope that it's a reflection of our life, you know, in the form of a videogame." The authors never intended for the game to exist simply as “a vault of sadness”; there are moments of pristine joy, when you spin Joel in the roundabout in the playground at the start of the game, or when you’re celebrating his end of treatment day in a kart racing minigame in the hospital corridors. And there are moments of tenderness, when Joel’s playing with the dog and you move the stethoscope around to revisit his sounds of laughter, or when Joel lies in his father’s arms feeding off the IV, and moments of anger, trepidation, and exhaustion when Ryan and Amy Green learn that the tumors have been spotted again and become overwhelmed in their tidal waves of grief. To try and label That Dragon, Cancer as another “tearjerker” would be wrong; the whole package is much more than just an outpouring of grief, and the game mechanics themselves serve as devices to impart the wide range of emotions.

You may have heard of the controversy surrounding That Dragon, Cancer’s address towards full Let’s Plays of the game, where some YouTube playthroughs of the game were copyright claimed due to audio (from Jon Hillman’s soundtrack) and the Numinous Games team lamented that some full playthroughs had hit millions of views with some not even linking to the original authors/source material, even though the game at that time had only sold a modest 16,000 copies. While the topic of the relationship between game developers and Let’s Players is beyond the scope of this review, I do want to state this; I don’t believe that a Let’s Play is a genuine substitute for actually experiencing That Dragon, Cancer. It is nevertheless valuable as a snapshot of how another person views the game through their own lens, but it will never replace Ryan Green’s vision of putting the player into the family’s shoes, experiencing every moment of their journey of hope in the shadow of death. He came to the idea of translating his experiences into video game form from reflecting upon one miserable night, where Joel kept howling from dehydration and nothing Ryan did could ease his pain; he had been thinking about how mechanics dictated how players in a video game interact with elements on the screen, and thought “This is like a game where the mechanics are subverted and don’t work.” Several notable instances registered during my own playthrough that confounded my own expectations. The structure of the overall game itself is an interesting example; most games of this form utilize a pseudo-open world environment within the levels, where players walk around with WASD and look around with the mouse. But as mentioned previously, That Dragon, Cancer simplifies this approach and works as a point and click to move to highlightable nodes; by doing so, it has the appearance of a game that suggests freedom within its environments, but in reality restricts you to only a few locations with certain viewpoints embedded for the characters’ experiences, as such takes full advantage of maximizing detail within certain viewpoints while subverting this expectation of free movement and focusing the player on reliving the experiences of those represented in the game while quite literally standing in their place. Another good example happens during a certain dream sequence where Joel is floating in the stars hanging onto heart balloons, while you as the player must control him, dodging spiky black balls of thorns that represent the antagonist of this narrative, cancer, omnipresent and always just lurking around the corner in its pernicious, pervasive malice. Here, the game subverts the idea of a win condition; you can keep dodging the spiky balls for as long as you’d like (or rather, as long as you’re able to), but there’s no end or reward to “doing well;” at some point, cancer will pop all of Joel’s heart balloons, at which the nightmare ends. Finally, the aforementioned story segment titled “Dehydration” puts you in the role of Ryan looking over Joel during that fateful night where an inconsolable Joel, wailing in anguish and banging his head against the hospital bed crib right beside you, simply cannot be stopped. You, as Ryan, can attempt to ease Joel by giving him juice boxes as a remedy for the dehydration, but Joel just vomits it back up. As Joel continues coughing and crying, the illusion of player control disappears and Ryan is left feeling empty, his head face down on his hands as he prays for relief, that a miracle will happen and bring his son a moment of peace. Only by playing the video game can you experience the shock when first offered the expectation of a certain degree of player agency, and then having the curtains torn away when it’s revealed that nothing you do will lend any semblance of changing the final outcome.

And yet, the developers went further; Numinous Games further experimented with their ideas of player perspective and player agency that could only be utilized in the video game format. One emblematic example occurs during chapter seven, aptly titled “I’m Sorry Guys, It’s Not Good.” You’re first introduced to the See n’ Say that Joel is playing around with as a brief moment of levity, the calm before the storm. Once the doctors enter the room, the animal slots on the See n’ Say become the faces of the Green family and the doctors; you can then use the See n’ Say to progress the conversation and shift the perspective to one of the doctors or the family members and essentially, listen to their inner thoughts. As the conversation continues, the sea level begins to rise; you as the player can rewind time using the See n’ Say to revisit the adults’ perspectives in the room, allowing you to take the necessary time to process the heavy topic of Joel’s final prognosis before the ocean swallows everyone. But at some point, you have to move on and accept that your actions cannot prevent the inevitable, just as Joel and the adults cannot fight the ocean; the lack of control becomes even more evident. It’s in this moment that I as the player began to reflect upon the time spent in the scenes prior; the game never rushed me as I spent time playing with Joel in the playground, or rocking in a chair holding Joel as he was fed with his IV, but did I, as the player, spend enough time with Joel to decompartmentalize everything that was going on around me, or was I just letting time slip by me in these fleeting moments when the end was nigh? This idea of using a video game space to capture and remain transfixed in moments in time was reflected in the documentary Thank You For Playing, where Amy Green commented that the family was so eager to document so much regarding Joel’s life and the everyday moments spent with him, because they were afraid of what would happen if they weren’t recording and if so, “wouldn’t ever be able to go back.” The final scene of the game, titled “Picnic at the edge of the world,” serves as a final reminder of this idea. Here, after taking a rowboat with just you and Joel, you meet Joel in the clearing of the woods on an isolated island, where he is surrounded by pancakes and finally able to speak coherently (not present prior because the cancer had caused significant development issues). He offers you a pancake and a seat at the picnic as he scratches his dog “Manju,” and your response is to blow bubbles as Joel stares in awe and attempts to catch them. There’s no strict time limit on this scene, as you can theoretically blow bubbles forever with Joel here, though the camera will begin to pan away after a few moments of non-interaction. But, you still the chance to go back if you change your mind for a little bit, as an icon appears to signify that it’s still possible to click back to the picnic to blow more bubbles. The player agency here is all that's necessary to signify the importance of this final moment; you can still go back and blow bubbles to your own leisure, but at some point, you have to let go, just like the Green family did. As such, no other medium can offer this idea of player agency and control to highlight just how important these seemingly mundane moments with Joel are in the overall scope of his life, giving you as the player as much time as you need to process the details while giving you the option to move forward when you’re ready. Nevertheless, it’s unafraid to suddenly take away that agency when it feels the need to make a point, as “That's what fighting cancer is like... no agency, no control”.

There’s one other significant example that I think emphasizes That Dragon, Cancer’s understanding of subverting video game mechanics and player agency/control to impart a wide range of emotions, in the form of Scene 9, “Joel the Baby Knight.” Here, the player controls Joel in a set of cardboard armor as Amy and Ryan Green convey Joel’s treatment as his battle versus a dragon named Cancer in the form of a bedtime story to their other children. Reminding me as an almost throwback to the early, crude 2D platformers I played as flash games on Newgrounds, this section is almost fun; you duck underneath Cancer’s fireballs as you traverse the DIY videogame landscape, throwing spears at MS Paint red serpents in your way. Eventually, Joel enters a cave, where he is chased down and trapped by the dragon. And here, the developers do something simple yet effective; you can’t actually slay the dragon. No matter how well you play with the rough controls, dodging the fireballs and throwing spears to increase your score as the dragon’s health bar slowly decreases, it will never decrease past half a heart. Because after all, as one of the other kids mentions, Joel’s just a little kid, and “babies can’t defeat dragons.” Nor can their neighbor Tim, from church; both eventually fall to the dragon. It seems like such an easy design choice in retrospect, but this metaphor, and my personal moment in finding out that my efforts ultimately would never beat the “boss,” spoke volumes in conveying how cancer is this beast that can be dulled, but never truly defeated. And it’s in this moment that Amy and Ryan Green begin to work in their faith, telling their kids that “God is right there fighting the dragon with Joel” and that while many brave knights have valiantly fought cancer, and that it may appear that they have lost because they died, “maybe getting to be done fighting was grace.”

Perhaps this is the most contentious aspect of That Dragon, Cancer. Ryan and Amy Green are very devout Christians, and their faith in God and those around them is one of the main themes of the overall game. For what it’s worth, I never saw this as a negative, because despite not being a religious person myself, Ryan and Amy never felt preachy to me; their struggle with maintaining faith in the depths of despair while their child battled terminal cancer is integral to them ultimately accepting Joel’s fate. Ryan’s struggle in particular feels very human; he has many glimpses of doubt and is portrayed as someone who wants to be “drowning” in his doubt, just to feel what it’s like even when Amy attempts to pull him out. Everyone deals with death in different ways, and I appreciate that something this personal is not only shown at all, but portrayed with thoughtful nuance; the Greens come across as far too earnest and caring of Joel for me to broach this topic with any sense of cynicism. Ryan has stated that “Loving Joel was not safe,” but they didn’t even see detachment as an option. Amy herself admitted, “We pushed past that self-preservation because Joel was worth loving, even if that love could crush us.” Ultimately, I will admit that I also don’t know how important my interpretation of their faith is; this is a love-letter to their deceased child that feels like I am infringing upon their personal space at times when viewing through their window, and while I and the Green family admit that the game is a tough sell, it is ultimately something so personal and so sincerely told that I’m not sure if outside interpretations matter in the overall scope of the Greens’ experiences. But there lies the bigger question; if the game is so niche, so “unfun” to play and perhaps polarizing to many who are not devoutly religious, and may even hit “too close to home” for some who have been there, then why take a chance and play this game at all?

Two particular stories come to mind. The first takes place during PAX Prime, 2013, in a small booth dedicated to showing curious attendees an early demo of the game. Responses to the game ranged from some hastily walking away, to some more becoming teary-eyed and needing some time to recompose before leaving, to the developer who began to sob and said “I don’t want to be here at PAX; I want to be home with my kids.” The depth of emotional responses evoked by the demo that Ryan Green witnessed that day brought something out of him that he had previously forgotten, and a little while later, as captured in the documentary Thank You For Playing, he too is beside himself with tears; according to him, his experiences of taking care of Joel and being alongside Joel during every step of his treatment had become so normalized to him, that he hadn’t completely realized the enormity of many of the memories that had been present in the demo. The second story comes as an extension of this launching point: during the Kickstarter campaign used to further fund the game’s development, Numinous Games gave their backers an opportunity to include messages addressed to their own family members and loved ones, many of whom had also battled cancer and were no longer in this world. These messages are scattered throughout the rooms and hallways of the scene titled “Waking Up,” in the form of hundreds of cards lying about the environment. This particular interaction is something that cannot ever be captured 1:1 by a video recording of the game; it is up to the player to choose how ever many cards and messages they want to read before moving on. Personally, I tried to get to as many cards as I could, but the sheer number of messages and tributes left me overwhelmed at times. It was in that moment that I realized my initial interpretation of That Dragon, Cancer’s scope was wrong; it wasn’t just a memorial for Joel, because at the end of the day, “…while this is a story about Joel, everybody has a Joel.”

I will be frank; while I may have experienced some degree of loss in my life, nothing I have experienced even comes close to the loss that the Greens have encountered in their recollection of Joel’s story. To even suggest that I could try and use my own experiences to relate my own struggles to their struggle of being right beside Joel Green during every step of his treatment and eventual passing would be disrespectful to his memory and everything that the family has gone through. That is why I believe that the least I can do, is hear them out. To gain a window into a snapshot of their lives as a complete outsider to try and better understand their experiences while looking through their lens with the video game medium in a tale that is so painfully intimate is something so powerful, that I’m not sure words are strong enough to describe the experience. Empathy is what can be gleaned here. Moreover, in another article, O’Hern et al. claims that the game may be conducive in the training of health care workers, stating that “[e]vidence suggests… empathy decreases during medical training,” and that emotional experiences like That Dragon, Cancer may serve as a powerful preservative of empathy. It’s why despite being a game that “is not fun to play,” That Dragon, Cancer is valuable in utilizing the video game medium and all its various tools and mechanics to more effectively convey its tale of Joel Green while providing an outlet, both for those who have experienced similar loss to share and for those who have not experienced similar loss to step into different shoes to better understand the perspectives of those who have.

I can’t help but hold the Green family in high regards for the decisions made during the production of this game, or how it was even conceived in the first place, or how its bold, intense, vulnerability alongside carefully examined and thought-out use of the video game medium manages to evoke a wide range of emotions. It’s unfathomable to me that “[i]t was the story that began as a miracle and ended as a memorial” and it still manages to remain more than just an outpouring of grief, because Joel Green’s death was more than just a tragedy. At the end of the day, it wasn’t even the story that they wanted to tell. Regardless, they’re choosing to forge their own path forward, and share their experiences with others in hopes that we can become more open about discussing death, or that personal experiences can be more expressively shared through the video game medium and we’re often “all in this together,” or even implementing death as more than just a video game mechanic that serves as a fail state or a trivial means to an end, instead taking a more “death positive” approach that examines death in video games in dealing with its meaning and its consequences. Ryan Green himself asks, “What if videogames are the inception of a medium that will allow us to encode the voices of people who have changed the world... or in my case, a small voice, that changed my whole world?”

In another sense, I was wrong again. I thought That Dragon, Cancer was far too personal, starkly penetrating, and profound for me at first; I originally saw it more or less as a documentary painted with adversity, an unspeakably hard tale captured in a video game space that I would play once, shed my tears, and move on having listened to their story with little to no catharsis. After all, how could one find catharsis in something that is so tragically true? But it was much more than that; the journey of being in someone else’s shoes, living a little of their life through video games capturing an emotional landscape that would otherwise be lost in time and having my expectations played with thoughtfully to impart an array of feelings that otherwise may not have been evoked from a more passive experience... that was the catharsis itself. I will not “score” That Dragon, Cancer or mark this with spoilers in the hopes of talking about this experience more openly and out of respect for the Greens’ story, but let this be known; I could not help but be moved by the earnestness of what was presented to me over the course of two hours. This experience has once again reminded me that emotionally compelling pieces of media have the power to change lives, and while still in their relative infancy in video games, games like That Dragon, Cancer continue to reaffirm my belief that this medium has value and still has so much more to offer. I suppose that’s why I play video games at the end of the day; to feel a range of emotions just like this, and to share my experiences with others in hopes that they will get similar reactions or experiences just like me. Thank you for sharing your story, Ryan & Amy Green, and may Joel Green rest in peace.

Sources used:

That Dragon, Cancer Steam Store Page
Thank You For Playing
That Dragon, Cancer 2016 Game Awards Acceptance Speech
That Dragon, Cancer wins Game Innovation | BAFTA Games Awards 2017
A video game to cope with grief | Amy Green
Curing ideological cancers with video games
Experimental Gameplay Workshop 2015: That Dragon Cancer
That Dragon, Cancer & Purpose
Errant Signal - That Dragon, Cancer
That Dragon, Let’s Play
On Let’s Plays
Turning tragedy into a videogame memorial
"That Dragon, Cancer" Feature Film - "Thank You For Playing" Documentary
E3 13: That Dragon, Cancer Interview
That Dragon, Cancer - A journey with a family dealing with cancer - PAX 2013
Interview With Ryan & Amy Green: Creators Of 'That Dragon, Cancer'
Meet Joel, taking it one day at a time | My Last Days
That Dragon, Cancer: A game for Joel
Tribeca ’15: “That Dragon, Cancer” Q&A with Ryan Green
Interview with Ryan & Amy Green and the Development Team of That Dragon, Cancer
A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever
Representation of Death in Independent Videogames: Providing a Space for Meaningful Death Reflection
That Dragon, Cancer—Exploring End of Life Through an Unwinnable Video Game

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Actually the best game I've played, and my favorite game of all time. First things first, this game is definitely not for everybody, it's full of very hard puzzles, looong dungeons, hard boss fights, and grinding (the latter is avoidable if you just don't do every single side quest). However many of those things are adjustable, there is an ingame setting menu that you can configure the velocity of puzzles and damage you receive, so for those that don't enjoy the difficulty of the game, you can just adjust it for your liking, even though i do recommend not doing so. Anyways, the actual game, is a hack n' slash overhead parkour puzzle thingamajig, it tries to simulate an MMORPG with many NPCs just running around and talking to each other and it really makes the game look alive, and it has this cool world building that it tells the history of the MMO that's where the game takes place, while it also explains the story of the game that we are playing, it's a little complicated to explain, but if you actually read the story, it gets very interesting, talking about the story, on the start it seems like a very generic kind of story that reminds you of things like Sword Art Online and Log Horizon, but the story actually gets very deep once the mysteries get revealed, i won't say much about it, and i recommend you pay attention to the stories, some side quests also have they're own little stories inside them, some are very fun to play as well, some of the big side quests are definitely worth a read. The characters are very charming and they stick to you very easily it really is kinda like playing with friends on an MMO. Now the gameplay, hoo boy, the gameplay, I've never played a game, so satisfying to just go around killing monsters nonstop, the gameplay is some of the best i have ever seen, it's incredibly smooth and once you get the hang of it, it feels absolutely amazing doing combos, some of the ""PVP"" bosses (isn't really PVP because it's still just the programed enemy, but in lore sense, it's PVP) are amazing to fight against, and I've found myself replaying the fight quite a couple of times on the arena, they are just so fun to fight against. The puzzles basically take every single gameplay mechanic you can think of, and it puts all of them together, they are very taxing and you really need to play attention to what you are doing later on, but once you actually finish a big puzzle, you get that sense of "Damn I'm amazing at this game" it's so gratifying to do, i can assure you it's worth giving it a couple of tries. The bosses are kind of like a mix, of a actual boss battle, and a puzzle, they implement mechanics from the dungeon they are from, and put's them on a real fight so you have to break your head and find out what to do while dodging projectiles and doing damage, it's a lot of things at the same time, but GOD it's so fun to do. The music and the graphics are also something else, the music is absolutely amazing and it's really hard to not love it, it never feels old, and the graphics are also amazing good this pixel art that gives a 2.5D feeling reminds you of older games but it gives it a new shine with a smooth animation in some areas a really good lighting, it's nothing crazy like some other games do like for example, Octopath traveler, but i fit's the game so well, i can't not mention it. The last thing is, the DLC is "A New Home" is basically necessary, it kind of gives the game an actual ending, and finishes the story very well, and without it, i can assure you that the game will feel a little incomplete, it is a shame that you basically have to pay a little more than just the game alone, but it's definitely worth it, i can guarantee. It's definitely my favorite game of all time, and although i can understand some people might not like it, i would 100% recommend this game to anyone, and it's definitely worth to give it a try.