Serious play

NEW YORK—Past the velvet ropes at a film studio in Tribeca, were two benches in the middle of a packed room, two screens, headphones, and a pair of video game controllers. One by one Tribeca Film Festival attendees tentatively sat down at a bench and picked up a controller. They entered a world that is not quite a game, and not quite a film: a poetic exploration of a family fighting the cancer in their young son.

This game, That Dragon, Cancer, is the real-life story of the Green family, whose son Joel was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010 when he was 1 year old. Ryan Green, Joel’s dad, is the chief developer of the game and a Christian.

The premise may sound morbid, but the goal of the game is “to love Joel.” The player can make Joel laugh, feed him juice, and race him around the hospital. The game’s other lead developer, Josh Larson, explains to gamers, “It’s Myst but there aren’t any puzzles.” He tells non-gamers, “You explore the world to unlock the story.” In That Dragon’s demo, you start as a duck in a pond, and a child is throwing pieces of bread at you. As you eat pieces of bread, your perspective shifts to the child and his family on the shore. The child, Joel, throws an entire loaf of bread in the pond. The family laughs.

That Dragon is part of a video game industry that has more cultural heft than ever, with video game revenue surpassing Hollywood’s box office revenue. Last year video game content generated $15.4 billion in U.S. sales, according to the industry’s trade group, the Entertainment Software Association. The U.S. box office generated $10.4 billion according to the film industry’s trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America. In recent years the industry has gone in more creative directions as independent gaming studios have taken off. Though big studios are raking in billions through violent titles like Grand Theft Auto V, video game developers are also putting out more meditative games that feel like films.

The film industry has been slow to recognize this shift to profound storytelling through gaming, but a few film festivals have recognized the trend. Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) started an interactive program to go alongside the Tribeca Film Festival back in 2011. This year That Dragon was the first video game TFI chose to showcase at the April film festival.

“That Dragon, Cancer I think was one of the first knockout successes,” said Opeyemi Olukemi, the senior director of TFI’s interactive arm, which focuses on nonfiction work. “It was like, ‘Wow, they got it.’” Olukemi invited That Dragon to exhibit during the festival, and throughout the year she picks interactive projects to fund.

For many filmmakers, according to Olukemi, game design is an afterthought. “When people think of interactivity or game design at the forefront of their project, as a story universe, you can always tell,” she said. “It’s always a strong end product. And usually, sadly, we see the reverse.”

The video game industry, in contrast to film, is already taking advantage of new technologies to tell stories that cross lines between films and games. This year Oculus, the virtual reality company well known in the gaming world, announced the creation of a “Story Studio.” The studio has released a few short virtual reality films, with creative direction from former Pixar animator Saschka Unseld. The Story Studio’s goal is not to entertain but “to enhance people’s lives,” Unseld said.

Larson and Green, the developers of That Dragon, Cancer, see a similarly deep role for themselves in their storytelling. They are fans of Terrence Malick, the director of intensely spiritual films like The Tree of Life. Malick’s films often don’t have straightforward plots, but show impressionistic moments designed to evoke different emotions. Other games are telling deeply personal stories: A popular narrative video game last year, Gone Home, told the story of a teenager exploring a sexual relationship with another girl. Green thinks Christians should be telling their stories, too.

“I think video game folks have been saying, look … this is an important medium,” said Green. “And their parents are thinking, it seems like kind of a waste of time. … Ultimately, I think that we need to use the language of our culture to describe what God is like, because that’s the context that we all share. In the New Testament they all had a context that they all shared, so they could say, the kingdom of God is like this, and everybody got it.”

At the interactive studio in Tribeca, Green stood off to the side as people played his game, holding his laptop clasped across his chest. His team was still working on finishing the game, which had been in development for three years. The last five years had been grueling.

Joel was first diagnosed with brain cancer as a 1 year old. He went through rounds of treatment, and just before he turned 2, doctors told the Greens he had a few months to live at most.

The Greens prayed that God might heal him. Joel’s brain tumors went into remission, only to have recurrence after recurrence after recurrence over the next few years. Doctors told the Greens multiple times over those years to prepare for their son’s death.

In one scene of the game, which the developers call “Terminal,” the doctors tell the parents there’s nothing more they can do for Joel. The player can spin a toy to shift perspectives and hear thoughts from the doctors giving the news or to the parents hearing it. The room begins to fill with water.

In March 2014, four years after his initial diagnosis, Joel died. Green questioned God’s plan in it all, but he also saw those years as a gift beyond the initial prognosis. Tech and video game news sites that had been following the development of the game published obituaries for the boy.

When Joel died, it shattered Green’s hope for a happy ending to the game, and the team had to rework the story. Instead of Joel fighting and defeating the dragon, the team decided to make the story about the player loving this boy. In one scene, the player explores an island that has a playground. You can push Joel on the swing.

Over the three years of development, spanning Joel’s illness and death, Green had exhibited the game at game conference after game conference. Sometimes his wife, Amy, and their other children came along. He and Larson have done interview after interview. They showed a demo of the game to clinicians at Sick Kids Hospital, one of the largest hospitals for pediatric oncology in Canada.

At the big gamer conferences like E3 and PAX Prime, gamers cried as they played, hugged him afterward, and told him their own stories of death and loss. Initially Green was surprised. “People just went there with us completely,” he said. Green himself is an emotional man, familiar with his own tears, and these conversations are exactly what he wants to come from the game.

Non-gamers often don’t get it. Green recalled a Facebook group for moms that posted something about a memorial to a child who died, which got thousands of shares and in the comments people were sharing their own stories. “They were doing what gamers are doing when they interact with what we’ve created,” Green said. The next post on the group was an article about That Dragon and commenters were brutal, calling a game about cancer “disgusting.”

“I think there’s a lot of baggage that comes with this idea of games,” Green said.

“You still see really smart people talking generally about video games in a way that at this stage is incorrect,” said Richard Clark, the managing editor at Gamechurch, a Christian video game site. “‘Addictive’ or ‘a waste of time.’” he said. As the father of two children he hopes to introduce to gaming, Clark says there is a lot of “horrible trash” for sale but he is starting to see more quality titles.

The Tribeca crowd was hesitant to try That Dragon, but after attendees played the demo, they too approached Green to talk about their own stories of tragedy.

“The main challenge with people who don’t understand newer indie games or newer storytelling video games is just getting them to actually sit down and try it,” said Larson. “Once they do that, then they get it.”

At certain points in the game, players can listen to Green’s poetry or desperate prayers. I asked Olukemi from TFI if she had any reservations about showcasing a game that had such overt religious elements in it. She seemed taken aback. “No, not at all,” she said. Wired UK, reviewing a demo of the game, said the inclusion of Green’s faith runs “the risk of alienating gamers,” but once you play the game, “it makes surprising emotional sense.”

Indie Fund is a group of game developers who financially back these kinds of games. In one of the fund’s games from 2012, Dear Esther, the player simply wanders an abandoned island, through beaches and caves. Snips of audio from letters play at different places around the island, forming a story. Some of these “narrative games” have more interactivity than others—That Dragon is a mix of the player watching and doing.

Dear Esther takes about two hours to play and costs $10. In contrast, games like Grand Theft Auto V require many more hours and cost about $60. AAA games, the industry term for games like Grand Theft Auto, can have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Green said That Dragon’s budget was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Independent developers can make and distribute their games cheaply. But video game critic Richard Clark said that “there’s more of a knowledge gap than a monetary one,” in terms of finding staff with the training to create games. Green and Larson both worked in the technology and gaming industries before going out on their own.

Green initially worked on the idea without funding, his family living on his savings. But his team eventually found financial backing from within the industry. That Dragon’s team also raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter for the project. Kickstarter supporters at a certain level of giving could contribute their own artwork and photos that the developers would then frame and put up on the walls of the hospital scenes. People contributed art in memory of their own children they had lost or a photo of a spouse who died.

Green has a team of eight now. He met his sound designer and composer Jon Hillman as they were both working in a coffee shop. Hillman was intrigued with the project and wanted to be a part of the work, an example of the spontaneous collaboration that is typical of independent gaming. His gorgeous soundtrack, recorded with real musicians and instruments, boosts the emotive power of the game. “It’s a hard game to make,” Hillman said, referring to the emotions of the developers themselves.

Early in the development, a major gaming studio asked to pitch the game for the That Dragon team. The studio didn’t end up picking up the game, but the developers were excited a studio was even interested.

“I think there’s inherent fear that as Christians we’re going to be censored, that [people in the industry are] just going to scrub everything clean of faith. But what I’m finding, at least in these industries, is that what they really respect is story,” Green said. “They’re all sharing their stories. Why aren’t we in the conversation? Why don’t we have a seat at the table? They’re willing to give us a seat at the table.”

The trailer for the That Dragon, Cancer documentary: