That Dragon, Cancer and how the digital age talks about death

“You have to let me feel this!”

Ryan Green is half-shouting, half-sobbing at his wife Amy. They’re fighting over the way that Ryan is dealing with the knowledge that their son’s diagnosis will lead to a future of palliative care and grief. We never see their faces, never get more than that solitary audio clip, but it’s a powerful, poignant moment that ends with us plunging Ryan deeper into an ocean of light.

That Dragon, Cancer is not an easy game to experience. It’s a eulogy, an autobiography, a cry into the dark. It’s one family’s endeavour to make sense of a looming tragedy, to press pause on a life that is—was— running out of time. Joel, the tow-headed child at the heart of the whole endeavour, died in March last year. He would have turned seven on the game’s January 12 launch.

Told through fourteen interactive vignettes, That Dragon, Cancer opens innocuously enough, with an idyllic forest and the player in control of a duck. We’re left to swim and peck at offerings of bread as voiceovers play. Here, we learn that Joel has difficulties with speech, the result of aggressive cancer treatments. Despite the gravity of the information, its delivery feels light. Neither Ryan nor his family members cry. They speak softly. They chuckle. There’s a sense of quiet gratitude permeating the sequence. Like they’re thankful for the few words that Joel can grasp, like they’re happy Joel is even alive.

And they are. (They were.) At 12 months, Joel was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor. He was expected to live four months. He survived another four years.

That timespan is framed in both metaphor and memory, dioramas of everyday life interspaced with fantastical imagery. One scene places players in a sterile room as medical personnel discuss end-of-life care for Joel, while another has us meandering through empty hospital corridors, picking out cards—condolences, get-well wishes—to read before listening to a voicemail from Amy. The former eventually becomes subsumed in a torrential storm, the latter transitions from a soliloquy about the ambiguities of cancer into a bright, frenetic, and utterly bizarre go-kart sequence.

Not all of it works. Some chapters are better executed than others, more easily processed, more universally comprehensible. Overall, however, the game does an unsettlingly effective job at communicating what it’s like to lose someone. I’m not just talking about the instance of death. That Dragon, Cancer, in fact, barely touches on that at all. What I mean is the heartbeats and the weeks and the months that build up to the final moment, the concert of emotions, the hopes, the fears, the little ways we learn to let go and all the ways we continue to hold on.

It’s messy.

Death is messy. Regardless of whether it is sudden or something you’ve long anticipated, it inevitably overwhelms, leaving us helpless and bereft of whatever bravado or composure we profess to having. Despite the fact all of us will die, very few of us ever seem anything but surprised when the end arrives.

“We have kind of abandoned institutions and sacred spaces”

A whopping 72 percent of 2,016 Brits polled last year said they felt their countrymen were uncomfortable discussing the subject, while only 18 percent claimed to have spoken to a family member about end of life wishes. Similar statistics can be seen across the pond. A 2013 survey revealed that only 26.3 percent of 7,946 American adults polled have completed an “advance directive”—a legal document that outlines exactly what should be done when a person is no longer capable of making decisions for themselves, whether it is because of illness or other extenuating circumstances.

But it isn’t simply an inexplicable neurosis that is endemic in our species. Modern society’s aversion towards the topic likely relates to the fact we’ve become a culture of youth. Look anywhere and you’ll see glossy, airbrushed bodies of every gender, their imperfections meticulously excised from view. The promise of eternal beauty hangs like a weight, cajoling us to invest in “anti-ageing” industries or to delay contemplations of our own mortality for another diversion. After all, even science suggests that immortality, or at least a greatly extended lifespan, might someday be achievable. We’ve moved beyond just researching ways to counteract disease; we’re diving into the mechanisms of ageing itself when not otherwise extrapolating on the potential of transhumanism.

It’s a stark contrast to how our forebears experienced life. For all of the poetry of the era, the Victorian age was harsh, marked by high childhood mortality rates and a prevalence of virulent diseases. Spurred by Queen Victoria’s eccentricities, the people developed a fascination with the idea of their demise. Their funerals were extravagant affairs, replete with written invitations and strict dress codes. People took mementos from the departed, locks of hair and posthumous photographs, anything to allow the living to retain a connection to the departed. It’s a theme that has echoed throughout mankind’s storied history. Wherever possible, we’ve tried to make sense of tragedy, attaching meaning to events or imagining a better experience for those who have left us behind, anything to exert some modicum of control over the inevitable.

The growing rise of secularism, however, means that we need alternate ways of examining and processing both our grief and our mortality, especially given the societal reluctance to address either topic. “We have kind of abandoned institutions and sacred spaces,” The Dinner Party co-founder Lennon Flowers told NPR recently. “We are still looking for spaces where we can talk about what we normally would have shared with a priest.”

Flowers’ nonprofit group works to provide exactly that: casual venues where millennials can openly discuss the ramifications of death, find catharsis, and most importantly, navigate what is described as “life after”—the stage that follows a state of active grieving. While valuable, the work being done by The Dinner Party isn’t necessarily unique. “Café mortels” have existed in France and Switzerland since 2004. Swiss anthropologist Bernard Crettaz was the first to organise such an event, citing a desire to liberate death from “tyrannical secrecy,” but Jon Underwood, a Web developer living in East London, was perhaps the one to popularise the idea. Since then, the practice has spread into a global phenomenon with Death Cafes opening up everywhere from Singapore to Ontario to Portugal, all of which are intended to provide attendees one thing: a space to talk.

A longing for immortality

But conversation isn’t the same as experience.

Some of the scenes in That Dragon, Cancer are uncomfortably intimate, asking you to stroke Joel’s head as the spectre of cancer approaches, or to fumble with juice boxes as he splutters and wails in agony. It’s haunting. Even if you’ve never held a child or contemplated the idea of having your own offspring, chances are these moments will still evoke a sense of human empathy. By removing the player from the position of the observer and forcing interaction, however minimal it might be, That Dragon, Cancer compels us to shoulder some of the creators’ grief and to embrace the legacy of Joel’s short life.

In many ways, the game is testament to how digital media fulfils one of our species’ oldest desires: a longing for immortality. For generations, we’ve sought to preserve our loved ones in marble and iambic metre, to provide some permanence to our existence. But static media can only do so much. Technology, on the other hand, represents a more intimate solution.

However, that isn’t without its problems. Take social media, for example. Though a ubiquitous presence in modern life, services like Facebook and Twitter are still learning to deal with the notion of user mortality. The former’s “On This Day” feature was met with criticism when it was first rolled out. Despite the company’s attempt to maintain sensitivity, many spoke out about how they were reminded of a death or a tragedy, a complaint that recalls the problems caused by Facebook’s “Year in Review” function.

Yet in a curious twist, the data tangled in our social media could be used to preserve a semblance of our beings. In one episode of British TV series Black Mirror, which deals with how technology might influence our futures, a grieving woman feeds information about her dead boyfriend to a company to create a virtual avatar. It might seem far-fetched, but we’re not far from that today.

There is a new social network called Eter9 that reportedly uses artificial intelligence to learn about your idiosyncrasies, your tics, your online mannerisms—all in a bid to create a virtual counterpart that will persist long after you’re gone. And it’s not the only one. Over 30,000 people have signed up for eterni.me, which is looking to create digital representations of its users that can “interact with and offer information and advice to your family and friends after you’ve gone.” Similarly, the Lifenaut Project encourages participants to upload “biographical pictures, videos, and documents” and organise the data by “geo mapping, timelines, and tagging,” lending continuity and credence to the avatar they create.

Current opinion suggests that none of these services have been able to generate believable emulations just yet, but it remains an interesting development nonetheless. Even as open-source machine learning platforms and neural network libraries become progressively more common, the field of artificial intelligence will continue to improve, refined by an army of enthusiasts. And one day, who knows? Maybe, we’ll live on in virtual reality, forever growing more sophisticated as our descendants update our firmware. Maybe not.