101. That Dragon, Cancer (2016)
That Dragon, Cancer, created by a small group called Numinous Games and categorized as a “walking simulator” on Steam, uses game mechanics to tell a tragic, autobiographical story: five-year-old Joel Green’s battle with terminal cancer, as explored by his parents (and the game’s creators) Ryan and Amy Green. It was released on January 12, 2016, on what would have been Joel’s 7th birthday.
That Dragon, Cancer utilizes its ergodic nature to brilliantly subtle pedestrian effects.[1] Your walking is labored and unaccelerable. The movement requires continued effort on your part, a powerful design feature which grimly encapsulates the father’s need to keep going past endurance. You can’t click once and have your avatar walk to his goal. Nor can you hold the button down, so he moves forward on autopilot. You need to click again and again, your finger pushing him forward several miserable footfalls at a time. Sometimes when you walk, your steps accelerate the passage of time, visualized by rapidly changing light patterns. One moment the sun is rising, three steps later night falls, repeated with depressing regularity as your avatar progresses down a hallway. Sometimes you have control over the screen and your perspective, sometimes a cut-scene takes over and zooms you out, like a film, gifting you a strange combination of impotence and agency. Overall, the effect is one of agential engagement mixed with utter futility, resulting from a fantastic ludological design in concert with the game’s content and themes.
The game is broken up into fourteen vignettes one can choose from individually or play through, like a DVD chapter menu. The second scene, called “Park at the edge of the world,” features a meditative island with a pond and a footpath leading across a bucolic bridge to a playground. At the playground, you find a father sitting at a picnic table, a cell phone playing an audio message from his wife about a doctor’s appointment, and four avatars of their sick child, Joel, perched on various pieces of playground equipment (see screenshot below).
This is early in the game, but you have already learned the ways you are able to move and interact with this world. When you near something, possible interactions appear in white with a symbol (an eye if you can look closer at something, footprints if you can walk in that direction, hands if you can touch something). If you choose not to interact with the Joels, you can walk from the playground down to a beach, where another Joel lies strapped to a gurney as menacing tumbleweed tumors pulsate angrily in the water; the camera then pans upward and flies you out over the water to the next scene, while a narrative voiceover invokes dragon imagery for the first time and you see a lurking, serpentine shadow on the water beneath you. This will all happen no matter what you do. But if you choose to interact with the Joels in the playground first, you can give him pushes and listen to him giggle. After each play-interaction, however, that Joel disappears. Once you’ve played with all four Joels, the playground is empty.
Several aspects of this scene seem important. First, there are no other scenes with multiple Joels or with disappearing Joels. As we later learn, this island is basically heaven, within the game’s coherent (and contiguous) geographical logic. The final scene of the game, set on this island after a harrowing scene in a cathedral in which Joel’s candle finally winks out, features a grinning Joel hugging a puppy, eating an enormous plate of pancakes, and speaking far more articulately than he does while alive. It is the location of a peacefully joyful coda to an extremely depressing story. Second, playing this scene so early in the game engages you unsettlingly in what you know is a story about this child’s death. To play with him is to disappear him, to leave behind a depressingly empty playground. But you don’t know, on first playing through, that the game will continue if you ignore the Joels and continue to the beach. Ignoring him could set you on an entirely different path. Perhaps, you think, by playing with him, you’ll earn points for something later, maybe medicine or food or more time with Joel alive. Perhaps, these Joels represent new levels or scenes in the game you can only access by disappearing him through play. Basic game logic demands you play with each one until he vanishes, because games do not tend to reward you for leaving stones unturned.
Or perhaps, if the game encourages you to play this scene with Joel until he disappears, it’s because playing the game That Dragon, Cancer returns Joel to a brief, digital life for the 90 minutes or so it takes to complete. Peggy Phelan has argued that performance “becomes itself through disappearance,” existing only in a state of ephemerality that cannot keep from vanishing, lest it “become[s] something other than performance.”[2] This state of presence reanimates Joel for an hour and a half, and you’re aware that mechanic will be at play before you buy the game. But by the second scene, this comfortable relationship between Joel’s revivification and your agency (you can bring him back to life!) has been marred by the jolting awareness that to play is to participate in his disappearance, as he disappears again and again under your eager fingers.[3]
Rebecca Schneider’s problem with this formulation (that is, that equating performance with disappearance and valorizing archivable remains as the only way of remembering a performance event “assumes that memory cannot be housed in a body and remain, and thus that oral storytelling, live recitation, repeated gesture, and ritual enactment are not practices of telling or writing history” (101)) speaks to born digital performances in an interesting but somewhat unintuitive way. Memory of a performed event does not live in the avatar’s “flesh memory” because the avatar has no flesh. If you die in a video game and restart a section, the flesh memory is in your own hands and brain, not in the avatar’s pixels. Bob Rehak calls the “frequent breakdown and reestablishment of avatarial identification through destruction of an avatar […] the most common and least discussed dynamic of gameplay […] central to the repetition from which video games take their structure.”[4] Your avatar keeps dying and disappearing but you don’t.
The repetitive nature of most video games also means that “you” are constantly dying, but also that you aren’t. In LIMBO, a terrifying game without color, your innocent, childlike avatar faces one horrific monster after another in its quest to cross purgatory. When the enormous spider with needles for legs skewers you, the screen fades, the scene restarts the moment before the spider crawls out of the water, and nothing is left of your previous demise. You remember it, but the game doesn't. In Super Meat Boy, the physical remains of your previous incarnations remain etched on the landscape, red reminders of the places your former body was smashed (and when you finally win, your previous attempts are all reanimated and you get to see all your cute, doomed attempts smashing themselves all over the playground). Plenty of games don’t display a record of your dead body, but, since death is effectively failure, they encourage you to respawn immediately, such that your onscreen “death” is little more than a snack break and an opportunity to try again.
In walking sims, though, you don’t tend to die in a way that leaves a physical trace or invites reincarnation. Either you don’t die, or you die in a way that completely disappears your avatar. In Wander, a walking sim-style “collaborative, non-combat, non-competitive MMO [Massively Multiplayer Online]” game, you peacefully explore an idyllic island as an amnesiac walking tree. You can transform, from tree to fish or flying animal, for example, but not die. In The Path, a postmodern walking sim based on little red riding hood, six avatars of little red (Ruby, Rose, Scarlet, etc.) are explicitly instructed not to leave the eponymous path, but each must leave in order to find her personal wolf in the woods and be (implicitly) murdered. When she is, her avatar disappears from the start menu. You can’t play her again without starting an entirely new game; there’s a sense in which death finishes her story. In Dear Esther, arguably the first walking sim, you spend most of the game as a grieving widower, but after climbing a lighthouse and jumping off in despair, you transform into a bird and fly away into the credits. Gone Home feels like a horror game (you should be able to die) but you’re never even attacked, despite the thunderstorm and creaky old mansion. In Journey, one of the most emotionally stunning walking sims available, your avatar trudges through miles of sand and snow before eventually slowing and collapsing; but then you magically lift (see image at right) and shoot through the cosmos to a final sequence and one last walk into a blinding white light.
In other words: if death occurs in a walking sim, it’s final. Your character disappears, floats away, finds peace, accepts the end. This encourages the player to accept it, too. While it is technologically possible to exit a walking sim and begin again, with a newly alive avatar, the lack of intermediate deaths (as in, a failure while puzzle solving, battling other creatures, or accomplishing a quest) and the sense of finality given to death in walking sims discourage this kind of play. If we take a walking sim as one of Bernstein’s scriptive things, it invites you to dance with it to completion and then rest. Without puzzles or outside goals, you aren’t swept into a competitive frenzy or obsessive fixation the way you might be with another game. You stay meditative, aware, thoughtful. You keep walking, then you stop.
That Dragon, Cancer is called a walking sim even though you often swim, fly, or drive instead of walking. In fact, walking takes up barely any of the game, and since the text is unicursal (one path, not multiple divergent paths), there isn’t a lot of room to wander. In part, of course, this is because “walking simulator” has become a catch-all phrase for art-games or anti-games (which is interesting in and of itself). But another explanation, I think, can be located in the relationship between walking sims, death, and disappearance. What if in walking sims, the repetition of walking stands in for the repetition of constantly dying? If, as Schneider argues, in performance we “(re)found ourselves in repetition,” the performance of repetitive death in a video game is, in a walking sim, subsumed in the much quieter walk towards disappearance, which manifests with every footfall (106). The small, intimate walk towards death subtly implied in every step of a walking sim (or, more broadly: every step of life) stage death no less than a violent game in which you die and respawn constantly; death is just located symbolically in the performative act of walking.
[1] As Espen Aarseth defines ergodic literature, “Nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. JHU Press, 1997.
[2] Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 146.
[3] See also Cassandra Khaw: “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.” Khaw, Cassandra. “That Dragon, Cancer and how the digital age talks about death.” Ars Technica UK. Feb 4, 2016. Accessed March 14, 2016. http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2016/02/that-dragon-cancer-and-how-the-digital-age-talks-about-death/
[4] Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being,” p. 110, Qtd in Michael St. Clair’s dissertation, p. 332
