The Dragon, Cancer

[Mr.TaLaL]

That Dragon, Cancer is a video game created by Ryan and Amy Green, Josh Larson, and a small team under the name Numinous Games. The autobiographical game is based on the Greens' experience of raising their son Joel, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at twelve months old, and though only given a short time to live, continued to survive for four more years before eventually succumbing to the cancer in March 2014. The game is designed to have the player experience the low and high moments of this period in the style of a point-and-click adventure game, using the medium's interactivity and immersion to relate the tale in ways that a film cannot. The game initially was developed to relate Ryan and Amy's personal experience with Joel when they were uncertain of his health, but following his death, they reworked much of the game to memorialize and personalize their time and interactions with Joel for the player. Alongside the game, a documentary Thank You for Playing, documenting both the last few years of Joel's life and the development of the game, has been filmed to be aired in 2016.

That Dragon, Cancer was initially aimed for release as a time-limited exclusive for the Ouya, who helped to fund the game's development. With expanded funding and a larger scope to the game, the developers engaged in a Kickstarter crowd funding, in association with Ouya, to secure additional funds to complete the game and assuring simultaneous release on other platforms including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The game was released on January 12, 2016, on what would have been Joel's seventh birthday. 
The game was praised for being a raw autobiographical experience from the parents' view, making the player deal with the difficult emotions and the strength of the Greens' faith.
 

That Dragon, Cancer are valuable. Claudia Rankin’s book Citizen flips the table on race. The Act of Killing brings light to the Indonesian killings of 1965 to 1966 and forces the audience to spend time with terribly violent men. It’s possible for difficult media to jostle us out of stagnancy, to see the world, concepts, people in a new way, and games don’t often make an attempt as bold and earnest as That Dragon, Cancer. In one of what are many torturous sequences, an inconsolable, terminally ill Joel wails at the top of his lungs while Ryan loses himself and sends a few desperate prayers to the sky. Afterwards, I called my parents. We talked about the weather in Montana and how the dogs are doing.

In exploring such untested territory for games, Numinous Games loses its message during the more conceptual moments: the awkward ‘mini-game’ sections and surreal set pieces. In one, you control Joel as he hangs from a bouquet of inflated medical gloves and floats toward a distant planet. Black cancerous spores threaten to pop the gloves if I move too close, and they eventually increase in number until reaching the planet is impossible. As a gameplay metaphor, it failed because I spent more time thinking about how awkward the sequence was to control than the content of the scene. The gamey vignettes don’t need to be ‘fun,’ but I wish my input felt invisible, so I could actively participate in every moment. Similar scenes make up the majority of the latter half of the game, and each forced a bout of aimless clicking and mouse waving while I tried to figure out what I could do before the sequence ended.Trailer

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