A Quick Note on That Dragon, Cancer and Interactivity

This is my review of That Dragon, Cancer for Feminist Frequency.

Someone on Twitter asked, how does the game benefit from being interactive? I guess they were asking: How does it benefit from being a game, as opposed to a film or a comic book. It’s a fair question, and it’s true that I don’t discuss interactivity in my review. 

The truth is that interactivity is so central to the experience of That Dragon, Cancer and to its meaning that I can’t imagine it being anything other than a game. It is a game to its very core.

When it begins, you are a duck, on a pond. Joel is tossing bread. You swim toward the bread. 

Then you are both Joel and the duck; tossing the bread, and swimming to it. You are the connection between them. You are the bond that exists at that moment. 

Your role shifts constantly. Sometimes you are Ryan, Joel’s father. Sometimes you are a witness to the private thoughts of Amy, Joel’s mother. Sometimes you are walking. Sometimes you are swimming. Sometimes you are soaring. Yes, you could observe all of this in, say, the pages of a graphic novel. But the very fact that you are playing it changes its meaning. If you were not a participant in this but just an observer, I believe that it would feel disorganized, incoherent. But the game makes us the connecting tissue. 

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Faith is hugely important in this game. The presence of God. And what I think That Dragon, Cancer does through play and interactivity, is let us feel that presence, whatever it might mean to us or whatever we might want to call it, not just in its characters separately but, crucially, in the connections between them. We don’t just observe the characters seeking, asking questions. We are the seeking. We are the impulse to reach out, to know love, to understand ourselves and each other as things that exist not in isolation, but in a kind of relation to each other that is so deep and mysterious that it almost defies understanding.