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.
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