You are in a hospital room at sunset, the angular light casting long shadows across the blue and green walls. You're wearing glasses and a rumpled green shirt, and your demeanor -- even in this rough-hewn, pixelated form -- is exhausted. You carry yourself like you've got too much on your shoulders. Which you do.
Somewhere in this animated hospital room, a baby cries. Your baby.
The light fades, and the wailing gets worse. You can't see your son, but you can hear his screaming -- the terrible, animal howl of a child in so much pain. You click around the room, searching desperately for something that will soothe a small child dying of cancer -- you bounce him, you feed him juice. "Shh, Joel," you say, "Shh." But nothing works.
You slump down in the chair, defeated. And you pray.
"Oh God, I want him here with me," you say. "Please."
The crying stops. Joel is asleep, at peace -- for the moment. The screen fades to black.
This is a scene from Ryan Green's intimate and innovative video game That Dragon, Cancer -- a gut-wrenching exploration of what it's like for a family to lose their son to a terminal illness. Priced at $14.99, the game was developed for Ouya, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS and released Tuesday via the website thatdragoncancer.com.
But it's also a scene from Green's own life. It's the experience that, four years ago, formed the kernel of the idea that would become That Dragon, Cancer. Not because of how much it resembled a classic video game, all vanquishing enemies and navigating perils, but because of how much it didn't.
"At first [Joel's diagnosis] was an adventure and I could be this caring father ... this hero who was going to help fight the disease," Green said Jan. 11, hours before the game's release. "But there are parts of our lives where there's just nothing we can do. We don't know the answers. And that's where we receive help."
Joel Green was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor in 2010, not long after his first birthday. He died March 13, 2014, at age 5.
In between were the four most harrowing years that his parents, Amy and Ryan Green, had ever experienced. Turning those years into a video game was a way of preserving their memories of their son, the profound and painful moments as well as all the mundane miracles of a child's life. It was a way of honoring Joel, of marking his presence in a world he barely got to see himself. And it was a way to give some narrative order to cancer's chaos, to turn the story of a failed fight to slay a dragon into a message about grace.
Over the course of 14 five- to-10-minute episodes, players are introduced to Joel and guided through stages of his life and death from cancer. The animation is vivid, but abstract. The character's voices come from home videos, or taped sessions in a studio. Baby Joel's infectious giggle comes from recordings of Joel himself.
In one chapter, the player pushes Joel down the slide at a playground while the little boy laughs and laughs. In another, you watch as Amy and Ryan are shown an MRI of their son's tumor, listen as they're told that the prognosis is not good. Sometimes there's something for the player to do -- navigate a go-cart around a hospital hallway; direct a tiny Joel, dangling from balloons made of blown-up surgical gloves, as he wends through prickly projectiles representing his cancer.
The game most resembles a traditional video game during the chapter in which Ryan and Amy explain Joel's illness to their other kids. It's called, "Joel the baby knight." Using the arrow keys, the player evades flaming fireballs and slays vicious beasts while journeying to kill the dragon called cancer.
But mostly there's a lot of watching and experiencing, letting emotion wash over you as you witness a family confront a child's death.
Green and co-developer Josh Larson started working on the game a year and a half before Joel died. They'd met online and bonded over a shared interest in nontraditional art games, ones less oriented toward risk and reward and more focused on cultivating empathy. The duo had built a few short projects together, but they were saving up for something bigger.
In November 2012, the tearful scene in the hospital almost two years old but still fresh in Green's mind, he suggested to his partner: "Why not Joel?"
They started with a demo of that hospital scene: Ryan fruitlessly seeking to soothe the crying Joel, growing more and more desperate as the baby's wails grow louder and louder. They brought it to video game conferences, not expecting much but hoping to find a financial backer or two. The response was enormous.
"We will all meet this thing, or have already met it," wrote game writer Jenn Frank after playing the demo at a 2013 conference in San Francisco. "Maybe that should be scary, but That Dragon, Cancer is about sustaining the hope and joy of life for just as long as we can."
Larson and the Greens got their funding, and the game became a celebrated cause in the indie video-game world. It was the focus of a documentary, Thank You for Playing.
Meanwhile, Joel was not getting better. He would experience 15 tumors and nine rounds of radiation before he died.
Green and Larson scrapped half their storyboard and changed the game's focus. It would be less linear, less about narrative, less centered around moving through levels of play. And it would be more about Joel: being with him, watching him laugh, getting to experience what he loved. "It was kind of this overwhelming desire to want to spend time with him again," Green said.
Razer Inc., which helped develop the game, will donate much of the proceeds from sales to Morgan Adams Foundation in Denver and San Francisco-based Family House, two cancer nonprofits that helped the Greens during Joel's illness.
ActiveStyle on 01/18/2016