The
scene goes like this. Ryan and Amy Green are sitting in a hospital
waiting room. Their toddler, Joel, slouches beside them, playing with a
toy that makes farmyard noises. He is giggling cheerfully – but their
world has just collapsed. A year ago, Joel was diagnosed with an
atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumour, a particularly invasive form of brain
cancer. He was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, but now a
doctor, fighting back his tears, is explaining that the tumour has
returned. Little Joel will not survive. It is just a matter of time.
A downpour starts and the room slowly fills with water as lightning
flashes in great, blinding streaks. Finally, only Joel remains above the
swell – in a small rowing boat, the room having become a violent ocean.
There is no way he can survive.
Such a scene would be harrowing in a book or a film, but that is not
how anyone will experience it. This is a scene from a computer game.
For the last three years, Ryan, a game designer, has been working
with a team of coders and artists on That Dragon, Cancer, a kind of
interactive biopic, exploring his son’s life and the experience of
caring for him. The game takes the form of a “point and click”
adventure, like the PC favourite Myst, built around his family’s
memories. It began with a book Amy wrote to explain Joel’s situation to
the couple’s four young sons. In it, she depicts his struggle as a
mythical battle, with his cancer portrayed as a terrifying dragon. Ryan
instinctively saw the story’s possibilities as a game. “Amy and I are
creative people, it’s just what we do,” he explains, in a video call
from his home in Loveland, Colorado. “I knew I wanted to make a game
called That Dragon, Cancer before I even knew what it was.”
One particular moment cemented his decision. In 2010, weakened by
palliative chemotherapy, Joel was struck down with a stomach bug. He was
taken to hospital and placed in an ICU room where Ryan spent a
devastating night, sitting with his son, watching as he wailed in pain
and frustration, banging his head against the bars of his cot. “That
experience stuck with me as something that was highly mechanical and
indicative of our whole experience,” he says. “You’re trying to find
just the right lever to pull to make everything OK. Maybe if I could get
him to drink some juice, I could stop him crying. Maybe if I could just
do that, everything would be all right.”
Ryan channelled this determination to “win”, to beat this invasion,
into the game. In one of the first sections he wrote, the players are
put into a small, plain room. They see Joel in the cot and hear him
crying, and they see objects they can interact with: a sink, a carton of
juice, a window. They try different combinations, clicking on whatever
they can to make the crying stop. But it doesn’t. And one thing you
definitely can’t click on is the door handle. There is no escape.
It is traumatic. Having shown off That Dragon, Cancer at various
games events over the last two years, Ryan and his team are used to
players bursting into tears. But what is brilliant about it (beyond the
simple visuals, which leave Joel’s face blank so that it can be mentally
mapped with another face, perhaps that of your own child) is the way it
subverts gaming expectations. It looks like an adventure game, a puzzle
you have to solve, but as the scene plays out, you realise that, like
Ryan, you are trapped here. There is no solution. At one point, the
viewpoint – which had been showing the room as if through Ryan’s own
eyes – moves outside the window and looks back in on the scene.
Suddenly, you are separated from Ryan’s anguish by a pane of glass. It
is a merciful release.
Ryan speaks about this moment with remarkable clarity – partly as a
parent who has experienced this despair, but also as a game systems
designer who can’t help thinking that way. “I see life as very
gamelike,” he says. “Fighting cancer is like a game because you’re
trying to do just enough to kill the cancer but not hurt the child. You
balance all the options. And it’s a multiplayer game because you have
doctors, nurses and family all involved in this process of trying to
keep your child alive. There are puzzles, as well as simple mechanical
tasks like administering medication, taking blood pressure, giving him
food – or making him laugh. The difference is that, in a game, if you’ve
mastered the skillset, you can beat the level. For me, that’s where the
comparison stops.”
But he is keen to point out that the game isn’t an attempt to convert
non-believers – it’s simply a medium that provides an interesting way
to explore a key element of his family’s experience. “Faith isn’t
something that me and Amy add on to life,” he says. “It’s intrinsic to
how we see the world, what we do for Joel, how we raise our children.
It’s not meant to be preachy – it’s to show you what it’s like and what
we’ve experienced.”
The game is, however, more than just a succession of emotionally
gruelling scenes. There are reflective moments and humour, too. In one
sequence, the Greens are at a pond feeding ducks when Joel throws in a
whole loaf, much to the amusement of his brothers. Although we only see
Joel on screen here, the soundtrack is a recording of Ryan and Amy
discussing the memory with their sons. It is deeply touching. Other
scenes are dreamlike and surreal, accompanied by short snippets of
poetry. The cancer is often shown figuratively: sometimes as throbbing
black skeletal trees in an otherwise beautiful woodland scene, or as the
swooping shadow of a dragon. “I want this game to have a rollercoaster
of emotions,” says Ryan. “I want it to have funny moments, sad moments,
desperate moments because that’s the whole experience. That’s what it
was like for us.”What the game format also allows is a sense of shared,
almost communal experience. During development, Ryan and his team talked
to doctors, family and friends, to Joel’s teachers, and they have
sought to give players direct experience of all these viewpoints. “There
will be moments when you can be in people’s heads or outside the
situation, looking at the conversation as a fly on the wall,” he says.
“That can be a freeform thing, something the player chooses to explore.
For me, that’s one of the strengths of a video game universe over what a
film can do: you have the choice of going in and out of people’s heads
and discovering a story in your own way.”
The team has also found that the game has become a release for some
players – a means of exploring and then discussing their own experiences
with cancer. It can be hard for a teenager to find comfortable forums
to discuss fear and grief, but games facilitate agency in a unique way
and they come with their own communities. “I think you’ll find that
people play it with their spouses, with their children, experiencing it
together,” says Ryan. “That’s important. That’s how you win the game in
our eyes – by having a deep conversation with someone afterwards, by
being able to talk about these important things.”
On 14 March last year, Ryan posted a short message to the That Dragon, Cancer
blog: “Joel took his last breath at 1.52am.” He died after fighting a
succession of tumours over four years, after relearning to walk and
speak several times. No one ever gave up. Work on the game paused for a
little while. The team attended the funeral, then coding started again.
In November, Ryan launched an appeal on Kickstarter
and raised more than $100,000 to continue development. He and Amy have
invested everything they own in the game – they have to keep going.
People have asked: “Is it right to make a game about cancer?” But
games are an expressive medium, just like books and films, and for a new
digital generation, they are increasingly the way that life is
processed and understood. Game-makers at major studios are growing older
and thinking about new things, meaning that narratives are maturing.
“We’ll have less games about saving the world and more about saving your
child,” says Ryan.
At the same time, the rise of the internet and the availability of
intuitive game-creation tools, such as Game Maker and Twine, have
allowed anyone with a bit of time to create thoughtful idiosyncratic
experiences and put them online for a global audience. There have been
games about depression, such as Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest and Will O’Neill’s Actual Sunlight; about transgender issues, including Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia; there is also Nicky Case’s self-explanatory Coming out Simulator 2014.
“There is something in this industry that’s pointing toward
experiential games,” says Ryan’s sister Stephanie, who helped demo That
Dragon, Cancer at the Rezzed festival in
Birmingham last year. “Games can show us real-life experiences – raw,
beautiful and moving experiences that take people in a different
direction. For Ryan, it’s an artistic expression, too, that whole idea
of games as art and what that means. I’ve been in that hospital room. I
knew what it was like, but not from his perspective. That’s what’s
interesting about the game: it gives you a glimpse of what it’s like to
be him, the father. It’s not a game about escape, you can’t press a
button to make it all disappear. It makes you confront the reality of
it. This is a whole new movement for the industry. There will be more
games like this.”