That Dragon, Cancer teaches players to long for renewal amid defeat

Christians largely have failed to make a lasting mark in the world of video games, the largest and fastest growing entertainment medium. Until now, Christians in the game industry either blended in or made niche games that failed to interest a significant portion of the 183 million Americans who sit down regularly in front of video game consoles.

But a new game that makes its official debut tomorrow stands a chance to be the first critically acclaimed and commercially successful Christian offering to the gaming industry.

That Dragon, Cancer tells the story of Ryan and Amy Green and their son Joel’s battle with terminal brain cancer. It has been followed closely by major gaming and tech publications like Wired and Polygon and by nearly every major news publication, including The New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal, and Forbes. Two documentaries have been filmed on the making of the game, one for NPR’s Fresh Air and the other, a full length documentary that premiered at the Tribeca film festival and will soon air on PBS. (See “Serious Play” in the Sept. 19, 2015, issue of WORLD.)

The game challenges people’s preconceived notions of what video games are and what they can do. Most people think of games as power fantasies—escapism that makes people feel heroic and accomplished. That Dragon, Cancer has the opposite effect.

In one sequence, players sit before a piano whose keys, when pressed, play the prayers Ryan, Amy, and their friends cried out to God the night before Joel’s death. Most other games would provide some combination or sequence of keys to save Joel. But in this game, no matter how hard they try, players will not be able to slay the dragon.

This inevitable defeat is part of what makes the game special. It tells a universal human story about the struggle against cancer—one so many of us will experience ourselves or through loved ones.

Unlike most media on the subject of cancer, That Dragon, Cancer contains no cavalier sloganeering about winning the fight. But that wasn’t always the case. When Ryan Green set out to make the game, Joel had survived much longer than the few weeks doctors initially gave him. Green believed God was going to perform a miracle. He saw That Dragon, Cancer as an altar, comparing it to the altar upon which the prophet Elijah dumped water as a demonstration of God’s power over the prophets of Baal.

His prayer was that God would do the miraculous and save Joel, providing a sign of His saving grace. But midway through the project, Joel died, changing the scope of the game. Instead of being a testimony to God’s victory, it became the story of one family’s very raw struggle to make sense of one of life’s most troubling realities, the death of a child.

That Dragon, Cancer gives us a window into Ryan and Amy’s prayers, doubts, and even arguments as they struggle with one another’s lack of faith. At times it’s incredibly joyful, letting us play with Joel in a park, and listen in as his brothers reflect on their experiences with him. Other times it’s harrowing, placing us in Ryan’s shoes and giving us the seemingly impossible task of comforting Joel during a particularly difficult episode in the hospital.

That Dragon, Cancer is an invitation to sit in the ashes with the Greens and mourn the loss of something inherently good. By challenging players to acknowledge the injustice of their loss, the Greens are speaking an invaluable truth about our world—it is not well. Toward the end of the game, Ryan Green reflects on the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead as a source of hope.

Like Jesus weeping with Mary at Lazarus’ tomb, That Dragon, Cancer asks players to come to terms with the world’s brokenness and death so they might long for renewal. In that sense, the game does succeed in being an altar of sorts, one that lifts up the potential of video games to speak the grace of difficult truth into our lives.