Crying along with That Dragon, Cancer

Back when I was in college, and had more time to read video game blogs, there was a lot of talk about whether the industry could create games that could make people cry. Even then, the question seemed sort of off-base: of course games can make you cry. Black Isle had shut down, and Van Buren was caught in the… well, fallout. We’d all suffered corrupted save games, impossible boss battles, and game-destroying bugs in the era before widespread patching. I guess there was also that thing where Sepiroth killed some lady, and the whole world cried about that. Admittedly, I didn’t make it that far in FFVII.

Anyway, the question of games evoking complex emotion was a bit silly then, and it’s ridiculous now. In the last few years, I’ve been devastated by more games than I can even count. I place the advent of games routinely making me feel awful somewhere around the release of Spec Ops: The Line, but developers have really ramped up the emotional resonance in the past few years. Games like To the Moon, Gone Home, Actual Sunlight, and Life Is Strange serve all delivery tear-inducing gut punches. Even Telltale’s Walking Dead earned a good cry; I can’t remember, but I think even their Game of Thrones made me tear up a little bit. The medium has grown up, despite the tantrums thrown by some Peter Pan “gamers” desperate to avoid such a fate.

The question is no longer “can games make us cry?” The answer is a resounding “yes.” The question, it seems, has grown more specific, and yet more diffuse. The medium now poses a series of distinct but interrelated questions, but I’ll start with the easy one: can a game make us cry from beginning to end? 

That brings me to my topic, That Dragon, Cancer: the short, true, and intensely personal story of pediatric cancer and its effects on the Green family, who both suffered through the prolonged illness of their son Joel and then found the strength to make a video game about it. The answer to the question, by the way, is “yes.” And the first of many corollaries is “do we WANT a game that emotionally exhausting?”

My answer is a qualified “yes,” by which I mean “yes, I wanted this thing to exist, and yes, I think that it’s a worthwhile experiment that moves the medium forward.” I also mean “yes, I reluctantly Kickstarted this game, not so much because I wanted the experience it offered but because I wanted the experience to be available,” and “yes, when I had a quiet evening to myself, I turned off the lights and did what I was dreading for several weeks after getting my Steam key: I played the game.”

Am I glad I played it? Yes. An unqualified yes. The game, with its meditative pace, its simple but thoughtful audiovisual configuration, and its unflinching emotional sincerity, is beautiful and harrowing. And it raised a whole crop of questions I didn’t even know I was curious about. 

Can a game make me feel paternal? Apparently, it can, much to my surprise. I have no wish to have children; aside from the massive time commitment that I struggle to even comprehend, I’ve always feared passing on my anxieties and neuroses to another generation, continuing the tradition of my mother, and her mother before her. I’ve never seen the allure of parenting, and I’ve never thought I’d be particularly good at it. Yet something about the Greens’ story, wherein they struggle to extract the moments of joy from the short time they have to share with Joel, sometimes succeeding and often failing, made me think that maybe I could handle it. Sure, I was just playing a game, and while the game is remarkably effective and engendering empathy, I didn’t really have to deal with the horror of losing a son.

But the game played a trick on me. While I was experiencing the story and chewing the scenery, I wanted it to end. I didn’t want to suffer anymore; I was tired of crying. The game is painful. But I knew that this was my one experience with the game. I knew that I would never come back this way again. It was too painful. Throughout my play, I was acutely aware that any snippet of experience I missed this time would be lost to me forever. So I took my time. I tried to hold it all inside me; the sounds, the notes, the hope for a miracle. I read all the cards I could handle reading (Can a Kickstarter reward tier make you cry? Yes). I treasured it all, even as it hurt me. I wanted to finish my experience, but I was also watching Steam notifications telling me that my friends were playing Skyrim or Her Story, and I wanted to know when I could stop and do normal things like they were. I could feel, in my own small way, the desperation the Greens felt, simultaneously hoping for the end while savoring the moment, wishing for a miracle the whole time. 

Right. So there’s the miracle stuff. And the God stuff. There’s a lot of God stuff. The Greens are believers. I’m not. So I struggled with another question: “What do I do with all this faith, when I firmly believe in a materialist existence that ends with death?” I take it, and despite myself, I ruminate on the mysteries of grace. Obviously, I don’t begrudge the Greens their faith, especially in a time of crisis. Like the game, the faith the Greens rely on is simple and beautiful, not pushy. It’s the faith of Job, and while it doesn’t give me solace, I do understand it. In that sense, That Dragon, Cancer is perhaps the most effective Christian game I’ve ever come across. It doesn’t attempt to proselytize, but it spreads the gospel in a way Left Behind or Super Bible Trivia or whatever could never hope for, because the Greens’ faith is based on hope, and love shines through the biblical platitudes that would make me roll my eyes in any other context. That’s the sort of faith I could stand to see more, and removing it from the game would make the whole experience lose its authenticity and its immediacy. My preferences aren’t germane.

Anyway, the game isn’t perfect. The controls can be clunky. There’s one spot where a bug forced me to restart a scene multiple times. In some scenes, there’s more to hear than there is to see. But these are niggling concerns. It’s tempting to dismiss them as the price of such a personal experience, but instead, I’ll say that they don’t matter. Like Joel, this game creates so many beautiful moments that focusing on the pain is missing the point entirely. 

Buy it. Play it. Take your time, open your heart, and appreciate the pain and beauty the game offers in abundance. Life is too short to do otherwise. 

How I learned to stop worrying and learned to give up on Undertale

Micro-review #1: UNDERTALE

c/o wikimedia commons

Boy, that's intimidating. I'm doing my first review on everyone's Game of the Year. I've tried several times to play this game, and quickly grew tired of the painful exposition, the limited and counter-intuitive methods of interaction, and the tedium of reading the same boss battle prequel doggerel before every attack. Then there was bullet hell. Then I was dead, back at a checkpoint.

Checkpoints are the death of fun; they represent the insistence that not only will you listen to this poorly-paced monologue several times to continue, you will do it each time from the beginning, with a bit of lollygagging around to set it up. This is not the experience of meaningful challenge (which is not to say it's not hard; it's quite challenging, and I am Bad At Bullet Hell). This is the experience of punishment, of being forced to to listen to a madman speak at length over and over while I fail, though failure adds nothing to the experience of the game but length. It is old-school punishing video game design, and I have no patience for old-school games. 

In the tabletop RPG world, there's a great concept of failing forward, pioneered (I believe) by Luke Crane of Burning Wheel HQ. The idea, in essence, is that a failure state ought to be as interesting as success; if you fail to sneak past a guard, your failure creates a new situation for the characters to tackle in different ways. The game gets more interesting even though your character failed.

This is what I'd like to see in video games. And while one fight in Undertale sort of delivers, it does a poor job of teaching the player when they are failing forward and when they are simply failing. 

Admittedly, this is a tall order in a small indie adventure game, but it's certainly been done. (I look at Invisible, Inc. as a great example of a small stealth game with fail-forward elements, where you need to adapt your plan, using different resources and areas of approach, when dealing with a compromised agent.)

Anyway, I'm willing to accept that this problem is mine, and mine alone. Plenty of people like old-school games, but I'm not one of them. So I put Undertale away.

And then several people who I generally respect in terms of narrative video games told me Undertale was a deep, thoughtful game. In fact, it was one of the best in years, and it does what so few games pull off: it overflows with interesting (if opaque) decisions and the Human Feeling of Joy.

I can always use more of the Human Feeling of Joy, so I jumped back in to Undertale, waiting for the Human Feeling to start. I am confident I did not experience Joy in my first three hours. I experienced some monsters with personalities, conveyed through three-line text boxes. I experienced a lot of walking around and hoping not to run into wandering monsters. I experienced some lovely music (Oooh! Strings!) and I definitely caught some Memes, which so many people seem to have confused with the Human Feeling of Joy, but I was confident that this was not what my friends and every major video game reviewer was pushing me toward. The Joy they were experiencing was the pure, uncut stuff. 

Then I got to a talking dummy. And a ten (or so) round evolving bullet hell game, which I tried to complete in earnest at least a dozen times. And then I got angry, and decided I don't care about the stupid Human Emotion of Joy enough to defeat this repetitive muttering dummy another time. I quit, because I was seeking Joy, and it wasn't there for me. 

I'm not going to say that Undertale is not a Joyful game. I would hazard a guess that its Joy is a very genre-conscious, trope-based Joy. There may or may not be a smattering of nostalgia. I suspect I cannot see it because I've never played Earthbound and I don't enjoy JRPGs. This is clearly a game made with love by for a loving audience.

But whatever Joy it has, it's the kind of Joy I've seen others experience playing fighting games, but have never felt myself. I've felt joy! I still remember finishing Gone Home and offering a blanket declaration that everyone, gamer or not, ought to play it. I could never imagine saying the same about Undertale in a non-gaming context. In fact, I doubt I'll ever talk about Undertale in a gaming context again, because I'd be a pariah. It will enter the "smile, don't talk, and hope this ends soon" discussion zone, where all anime conversations take place. 

I'm not broken. I just realized that I find my Joy in different things. And this, my coming out as a malcontent who couldn't find the Joy in the Game of the Year, is a reminder that I can stand apart and still within our hobby. I respect your joy, and I hope you're OK with me choosing to pursue mine. If not, this is a fine hill to die on. 

Tomorrow, I'll come back and talk about something that does indeed Induce Human Joy in my robot heart: Shenandoah Studios' Battle of the Bulge, on iOS, Steam, and maybe some lesser platforms. 

A year alone in the Tower of Stuff

Look in any room in my spacious but poorly-engineered Brooklyn apartment, and you'll find towering pile of stuff. The form changes, as does the length, breadth, and structural integrity of the literal and metaphorical towers. Some are bookshelves, tall as "real" towers, full of every kind of wonder: every printed RPG designed by Jason Morningstar, each of which I'd kill to play, in the good company of D. Vincent Baker and any other dude or lady who was able to sell me on some crazy high concept indie RPG nonsense; no fewer than five shelves of old World of Darkness stuff, a teenager's love affair rekindled by the touch of leatherbound 20th anniversary editions, books I keep around to appreciate as texts qua texts, though I harbor a secret desire that one lonely night, I will be visited by a dark stranger who initiates me into the actual play of unliving, undying Gothic Punk creatures of the night; lots of Shadowrun from every edition, barring the first, each of which has its charms, none of which are playable as written. A full tower of trade paperbacks, brimming with comics I love and comics that I... well, at least I read them. Two sleek (if not sturdy) IKEA bookshelves, bought in haste when I was moving and they were discontinuing the model, stacked top to bottom with board games: party games, some economic stuff, some "dudes on a map" numbers, and more wargames than I'll ever play in a lifetime. I love them all, even though I'm constantly cycling out the old and bringing in the new, sometimes without ever playing them. They, too, sit in a pile, getting ready for sale or collapse, whichever comes first. The computer, which looks tidy enough, until you realize there are literally one thousand Steam games on there, at least a hundred completely unplayed: the episodic Kentucky Route Zero; The Masterplan, my game of the year, which I never quite got around to finishing; Undertale, which feels like homework because I have no soul. And then there are the big ones. The Witcher 3. Any given Paradox Interactive or Total War game, where scratching the surface is a 50+ hour requirement.

courtesy cottonvalent
on deviantart

All the other rooms are the same. The old favorite records, the LEGO sets in the closet, my grandfather's bookshelf half full of my grandfather's books. The  bedroom bookshelf with a whole different set of White Wolf and indie RPGs. 

Let's not even talk about the freeform LARPs. I wasn't even into that stuff a year ago, but my tower would fool you!

All I ever wanted to do was play good games and maybe talk about them. Now, despite my best efforts to cycle things out, I'm drowning in games. My life is exploding with games. My towers require The Tower, the card of upheaval and sudden change. 

I need to hit the brakes. 

I enjoy these games I play, when I'm not surrounded by boxes and books and bits representing endless possibility. They make me feel centered. They make me feel smart, social, and creative. I love gaming. But I've let the acquisition of gaming ephemera take the place of gaming. That will not do.

I'm making a pledge to myself to use the stuff I have, to review it, or at least meditate on it, without acquiring a bunch of new stuff. Sure, I have some outs. Pending Kickstarters. GMT P500 orders. Humble Monthly Bundles. A Steam budget in the form of gift cards. Limited stuff, so that I can truly ride the wave of excitement should one roll past, but not enough to distract me from my task: I'm going to play these games, and read these books, and then use those books to play awesome games. In the process, I'll strengthen existing friendships, try to make new ones, fight off the fear, and make something worthwhile and creative out of my free time.

I don't know what form it'll take. I'll take at least a stab at podcasting, blogging, reviewing, designing, meditating. Something like that. Anything other than joylessly consuming. 

This is not my homework. This is not my job. This is Remarkable Fun. Let me tell you about it. 

Let the music play, let the games begin, and let the bards write epics about the times we've had.