The last time I wrote about lessons in games I had discussed the lessons I had learned about gender norms and sexuality through my time playing Phantasy Star 1 and 4 as a child. Today, I'd like to talk about a new lesson I've learned, just this night, from a newer game. 'That Dragon, Cancer' is about a Mother and Father's reaction to their son's diagnosis of cancer. The story focuses on struggling through treatment, confusion regarding faith and the internal struggle and the resulting relational problems of the two parents who are responding to the disease very differently. Throughout playing the game, I spent the majority of the time thinking about a recent death that I had experienced. Through playing that game I re-grieved that person's death and found a new way to heal.
I'm not very practiced in grieving. I've performed mental health therapy that focuses on grief for clients and families. But when it's your own grief it's a very different experience. Like the parents in the game, I had gone through a lot of emotions when the person died. Numbing, anger, frustration, existential crisis, sadness, and so on. You name an emotion and I probably felt it. But the logical part of my brain was fighting all these emotions trying to calm them all down. Which led to an internal tornado inside my mind that had me confused and emotionally and cognitively wrecked for months and months after that person had died. As time passed, I had thought that I had appropriately grieved that person's death because my mind had calmed. The emotions had passed and logic was back in place. I was me again. But it was a false front. What I had done was forgotten the pain, not resolved it. 'That Dragon, Cancer' had brought it back up again but it brought with it a lesson. I can't speak to the intentions of the parents of the game but I can infer through my own experience. This game felt like a way to resolve parents' grief. To come to terms with thoughts they had had but may not have liked, to recognize emotions that they may like to never expereince again, and to find meaning in the pain of seeing their son fade away. I realized that I hadn't done any of these things with the person who I had lost. I hadn't learned any lessons. I didn't know all the emotions I felt and thoughts I had had. I had calmed and that was good enough for me. But that was just a lie to make myself not face difficult realities that that person's death had brought to the fore.
I'm not a game developer. Not really much of an artist either. But I can write my thoughts down. So I wrote a letter to that person who had died. Like the parents of the boy in “That Dragon, Cancer” I had decided to come to terms with the good, bad and ugly that comes from death. Like that game, the person who died was only half the story. Death has a way of making a person look at themselves and their life in a way that we rarely do. It leads to some harsh lessons and difficult realities. Lessons and realities that I had ignored but that these parents had not. So I faced them as well as I could. I'm not going to share my letter here because I'm not as brave as these parents. But I will say that I learned a valuable lesson from 'That Dragon, Cancer' that I wasn't expecting. I really respect these parents and I hope that they've found some peace after releasing the game. But I also want to thank them for helping me find peace.
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