Joel Green is hysterical and there’s nothing I can do about it. I try bouncing him on my knee, but whenever I stop, the giggles give way to fresh anguish. I try offering him a carton of apple juice, but what little fluid he manages to swallow soon comes back up, chased by curdling screams.
Many video games are power fantasies. This video game is something else. It’s a puzzle without a solution. It’s a game about pain, loss, fear, and, ultimately, surrender. In many ways it’s a disempowerment fantasy. Except that Joel Green’s story is no fantasy.
‘That’s how it really happened,’ Ryan Green, Joel’s father and the co-creator of That Dragon, Cancer, told me. ‘We were in the hospital. Joel had acute stomach pains. It was right after that the doctors declared him terminally ill.’ Within two hours, Joel had become severely dehydrated and, because of the stomach bug, he was unable to keep any fluids down. The pain that any parent feels when unable to meet the need of their child is incomparable.
‘For six hours I couldn’t comfort him,’ said Green. ‘It was a window into hell. I felt overwhelmed. I called my wife and said: “You need to come. I can’t do this any more.” ’
When I first spoke to Green, his son Joel was four years old and fighting through his third year of terminal cancer. For three-quarters of his life he had been chaotically sick. His young body had already endured a life’s worth of surgery, chemotherapy, and prayer. The tumours left him partially deaf and blind and, at one point, forced him to relearn how to walk. Yet Joel confounded his medical team’s expectations with a resolute determination to stay alive, to endure despite it all.
Any family made to live with ongoing pain, hope, and grief in this way must find a way to articulate, celebrate, or simply express their experience. Some do it with photographs, home videos, written diaries, or blog posts. Ryan Green, a game developer, decided to make a video game about his experience, a way to both record the journey and to try to make sense of it while he was still caught in the squall.
‘It’s important to me that, when I’m speaking about my journey, that I’m doing it from a “now” perspective,’ says Green. ‘You get a lot of wisdom in the pressure cooker. I like to think of this as a cup of water. I want to scoop it up and hand it down to someone to drink. I think I can do that more effectively in the middle of this thing than afterwards. I’m not trying to create rules for people to follow when dealing with cancer, or some potentially damaging platitude. This game is just a reflection of how I see the world, of my story.’
Back in the hospital room, I lay Joel in his narrow cot, the air thick with imagined smells of antiseptic and laundry. It’s the middle of the night and there are no nurses in the forsaken corridors. Joel’s screams are inescapable and unfathomably distressing. This is a video game, but the real effect of a baby’s suffering on the human instinct is no less diminished in unreality: everything in me longs to settle him, to meet whatever elemental need he has in this moment, to complete this most urgent of quests. Joel lies quietly on the bed for a moment. Then he smashes his head against the railings. I hunt for an ‘undo’ button, some floating prompt to click that will reverse the action, lift him from the crib and stop this self-harm. But the only prompt I find reads simply: ‘Pray.’
Green began working on That Dragon, Cancer in November 2012 with his friend Josh Larson. The pair met at the ‘Meaningful Game-play Jam,’ an event organised by Larson to encourage games that, in his words, have the power to ‘cause someone to live differently.’ In Larson, Green found an ideal teammate for this difficult project.
‘Josh and I share a perspective on both games and life,’ says Green. ‘We are interested in telling stories that speak to the deepest things that people have to deal with. The medium is pregnant with potential to do this. Games exist at that nexus where film meets programming. Instead of passive viewing, you invite people in, to actively walk with you. They can see what you saw or feel what you felt.’
We have seen how video games can provide a refuge and sanctuary for people, a place to retreat from the slings and arrows of existence, to escape and even to salve pain. But for Green and Larson, That Dragon, Cancer was something else. For them, as designers, this was a place into which they could invite others, in order to share their experience, to communicate the pain and uncertainty of living with a terminally ill child, and to celebrate that young life. For Green in particular, the project has been a way to process a painful journey, and in that process take an unusual step towards healing.
‘I want people to love my son the way I love my son, and to love my son you have to meet my son,’ he said. ‘A video game gives the opportunity to meet my son and meet our family, and kind of walk with us in our shoes, but from a safe place.’
Back inside the game, I click ‘Pray’ and the adult character in the scene, voiced by Green himself, utters a desperate, gutsy plea for divine intervention, something, anything, to ease the child’s pain. The words are a far cry from the primary-colour pleasantries of the Sunday-school teacher; rather, it’s a longing from the deepest place, a Gethsemane appeal, spat out in desperation on sore knees. As the prayer continues, Joel’s cries settle into sniffles and, finally, still into mute, peaceful sleep. The relief is palpable. In that moment, the player fully feels the release and freedom that Green must have encountered in that room.
It’s a seemingly novel moment in a video game, but is the underlying experience very different from so many virtual problems that need solving? In this early scene (just one of the many vignettes that comprise the full game) the player is presented with a problem and, by investigating their environment, must uncover the solution, in this case a deus ex machina in the most straightforward sense. In life, I put it to Green, even for people of faith, God does not always offer such a practical aid to tribulations. How, then, will the pair avoid making ‘Pray’ the solution to each of the game’s terminal problems?
‘That is the great mystery,’ says Green. ‘Joel has seizures because of the chemotherapy. They are serious seizures, but he doesn’t shake and drool or convulse. It’s more of a head nod; his head falls forward. We pray for this to stop and, you know, the most frustrating, confusing, helpless thing for any parent is to pray and for nothing to happen. I think that’s another aspect of faith: perseverance in the face of this storm that won’t go away.’
Despite the centrality of faith to Green and Larson’s development of the game (and the experience upon which it’s based), there’s no sense that That Dragon, Cancer is a proselytising work. ‘I’m trying to come from an honest place,’ says Green. ‘I’m not trying to tell you how it should be. I’m just trying to show you my perspective. Maybe it has value. I hope it does. I hope people see the world and God in a different way, perhaps. But I am not out to make converts. There are universal things here that we can all understand.
‘In that hospital, at two in the morning, I remember crying out. I remember my prayer changing from pleading “Stop this” to becoming more of a thankful thing. Joel may have been declared terminal, but he wasn’t dead. That’s when there was peace and he fell asleep. It’s not about saying that this is how it must be for everyone. It is a case of saying: this is how it happened for me.’
Video games are rarely used for autobiography, but as we have seen, their capacity to allow others to view the world from a person’s perspective makes them ideally suited to the task. In a video game, not only is it possible to place a player in the shoes of another person; it’s also possible to subject the player to the same circumstances, pressures, powers, and systems that this person experienced. How much more effective might it be, when attempting to communicate your circumstances to others, to allow them to experience those circumstances for themselves, to feel the sense of powerlessness and sorrow that Green felt directly, rather than through the more detached mediums of documentary or written biography?
This is, early in the twenty-first century, unusual territory for video games. Will people truly be interested in playing a game that deals with such uncomfortable subject matter? Why would anyone want to play a game in which the person you are tasked with caring for might not make it in the end?
‘That is the great risk,’ Green said. ‘At any point the medical team could tell us to prepare for death. I am living in the shadow of that possibility. I’m wrestling with having an ending where Joel lives or an ending where he dies. We wrote a book, and our ending was: maybe he’ll live to eighty. It’s such a huge risk to say something like that: the reality might not match the hope. I am coming to terms with maybe being OK with that. But I am still contending for the greatest thing … I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if he dies or lives or both. Maybe we end the game before we know?’
I asked Green the hardest question: will the game’s message remain the same whether Joel—the real Joel—lives or dies?
There’s a painful pause.
‘I hope the message doesn’t change,’ he replied.
We sat in silence for a while.
Then: ‘Maybe it will change for a while, you know? But that’s the thing with life. You go through these hard things and sometimes you deal with anger. Sometimes you deal with a feeling of injustice. Sometimes euphoria. My hope is that eventually I can step back and trust that it’s going to be a good story in the end. A lot of players don’t want to enter our story. Because he could die, right? And who wants to play a game about that? But I want people to trust that I am going to tell a good story regardless. Because, as difficult as it is, I am living in a good story.’
Few video-game stories are tragic in the classical sense. By virtue of making it to the end of the game, the player must have triumphed. (A few games, such as Spec Ops: The Line, play with this apparent inevitability; completing the game, a damning examination of war and its video-game depictions, makes clear that you are complicit in the downfall of the main character, and confronts you with the tremendous damage you’ve caused throughout the game—a pyrrhic victory at best.) Where early video games relied on the inevitability of failure to keep players adding quarters to the arcade machine’s coin slot, today’s games lead players to expect that victory, not failure, will be the conclusion. But in literature and cinema, there seems to be a greater willingness among creators, readers, and viewers alike to approach more troubling thematic subject matter.
I wonder why Green and Larson believe that people would want to play their game, to choose to experience such devastation, even second-hand.
‘Hope,’ says Larson. ‘People search for hope in things. This is a game filled with hope. And for me personally, as a video-game player, I want to taste the full range of human experience. In books or film you get to have those experiences, to explore what it means to live. But in games we typically focus on small subsets of life. To be immersed in other situations. There’s value in that.
‘People reject thinking about cancer because they are ultimately afraid it’s going to happen to them,’ he continues. ‘Nobody has a problem watching a zombie horror film because, on some level, they know that this is fantasy. But cancer is a real and present enemy to humans in this life. And it’s everywhere. My journey has been characterised by coming out from under that fear. There’s this scene in the movie Rise of the Guardians when one of the characters looks fear in the face and says: “I know who you are but I’m not afraid of you.” I’ve feared cancer for my entire life. Then it happens. And life goes on. You learn this when you go through a great struggle. I hope people can somehow overcome their fear through this game.’
On March 15, 2014, at 1:52 in the early hours of the morning, Joel Green died.
When I heard the news, I grieved. I had been there, in the hospital room, when Joel was unable to find respite from the pain; I had been broken by his interminable anguish and, eventually, overwhelmed with relief when he finally found rest. The news that his young life had ended, news of a death on the other side of the world, in a family with whom I had no real connection, was devastating. I thought about the family regularly as the weeks clustered into months.
Eventually, I wanted to speak to Green and Larson, to find out whether they would continue making the game or whether it had now fulfilled its function. Ever gracious, the pair agreed to speak.
‘There have been emotional moments for all of us over the last months, and times where some idea is just too intense to develop. For me it was working with MRI imagery,’ Larson says. ‘But this season has also been very fulfilling for all of us and has brought about great clarity. Joel’s passing caused us to take a step back and reevaluate the vision as a whole. We decided to focus more on who Joel was and what it was like to be with him and to love him. This is a noticeable change from the previous direction of sharing all the ups and downs that Joel went through. Maybe another way to put it is that we moved from focusing on the plot of Joel to focusing on the character of Joel.’
For Green, the game is now as much a way to preserve the memory of Joel’s life as a way to invite others into the landscape of his illness.
‘I want the game to capture the way Joel danced,’ he says. ‘The way he laughed. The way his brothers treated one another. The affection they have. I want to put those things in the game. He was the sweetest kid. I can’t really articulate … I hope to capture some of that; some of who he was and is. In the end, I guess my greatest hope is pretty simple: that players might care about my son the way that I do.’
Most video games feature death, but only a few are about death. Jason Rohrer’s Passage, released in 2007, is one of the earliest examples, a simple experimental game in which death is inevitable for the player, with no hope of respawn. In Passage, you have, to use the video game’s favoured parlance, only one life. Your character, who can move only from left to right across the screen, ages incrementally with each step. As you move through the game’s landscape, your character ages. You slow, at first, and then the game robs you of your beauty, takes away your loved ones, shrinks your family. Finally, your character dies. (Rohrer told me at the time: ‘I was about to turn thirty, about to witness the birth of our second child, and had just watched a neighbourhood friend wither and die from cancer. As such, I was thinking about the passage of life—and my inevitable death. I wanted to make a game that captured the feelings that I was having: existential entrapment bundled together with a profound appreciation of beauty. These are feelings that are hard to put into words.’)
That Dragon, Cancer is a different kind of examination of death. It is an invitation for us to step into a family’s world, in all of its turmoil, sorrow, and joy. The game is not only a study of human suffering, but also a celebration of a human life, and through it anyone who is interested or affected has the opportunity to grieve and celebrate with strangers. It is, however, difficult subject matter to engage with, especially within the participatory prism of a video game, where we are no longer mere spectators to the story, but active participants within the drama. As such, while we are all invited, there’s no shame in declining the invitation.
But for Christos Reid, a young game developer from the UK, and creator of Dear Mother, it was crucial that his intended audience showed up.
‘I came out to my mother as bisexual during a temporary stay with my parents,’ he explains. Reid’s mother is a deeply religious person who, in his words, ‘used that religion to justify her homophobia.’ On hearing Reid’s admission, she told her son that he was ‘sick, wrong, and going to hell.’
‘She told me I couldn’t live in her home if I wasn’t straight,’ he tells me. ‘And so I left.’
When Reid moved into his new home, he began to try to process what he’d been through—to understand why a mother could reject her son for something over which he had no control.
‘I had to deal with it, because to hold it inside me forever seemed unwise,’ he says. As a way to get the pain out of him, and perhaps to begin to process his experience, he took out his laptop and began working on a game.
‘Not long later, I’d made Dear Mother,’ he says. ‘An open letter to my mum about how her beliefs had broken my heart.’
Dear Mother, which is freely available to play on the Internet, is a simple game using archaic, blocky sprites to represent its characters and world, the kind you might have seen in the early 1980s. The game begins with a conversation between two characters. One, Reid’s mother, begins by saying: ‘My son … You must not sin.’ The action then moves to a road outside a house. You play as a boy who must collect the angels falling from the sky, while dodging the demons, by moving left and right across the screen. A shadowy figure stands in one of the house’s windows, presumably Reid’s mother, watching her son as he tries to please her.
‘Each devil causes your heart to break a little, and the game is structured so that, eventually, collecting enough devils to break your heart becomes unavoidable,’ explains Reid. ‘It’s at that point that you leave, move to a new home, and you’re allowed to simply collect people, instead, which heals your heart up piece by piece.’
The game has no win condition: you cannot evade a broken heart and, once you’ve been kicked out of your home, your only choice is whether to collect healing relationships, or dodge them and remain broken-hearted. Without Reid’s backstory, it’s a game you’d probably ignore, but with context, it’s a powerful illustration of his experience. But Reid didn’t make the game for us. He made it for himself and, crucially, for his mother.
‘To this day I’m not sure if my mother played it,’ he says. ‘I doubt she has. But I took a printout of some press coverage of the game to dinner with my father. He’s never really been that interested in my games. But when he found out Dear Mother was about my mum, he read the article. It opened up a conversation. I’d broken a big rule in our family—to never discuss my mother’s failings or abuse outside of the home.’
Reid wanted his mother to play the game in order to understand, most simply, how her actions had affected him. But he did so knowing that it was unlikely she would take an interest. As such, he also made the game for his own benefit.
‘By making Dear Mother, I was able to finally say goodbye to someone who had been a constant source of abuse, and I was able to open the door into how I felt, without having to tell anyone directly,’ he says. ‘I was able to move on, having distilled my feelings into the game, and allowed people to walk a mile in my shoes by handing them a set of controls and a window into my life.’
Reid found the experience so worthwhile and helpful that he has continued to make games as a way to examine and work through things that happen to him. He is currently working on OCDEMONS, a game about his experience of living with OCD and experiencing cognitive behavioural therapy in order to minimise the disorder’s negative effects on his life.
‘Every time I finish one of these games, I feel like I can take that issue, that part of my day-to-day that harms me, and breathe it out,’ he explains. ‘It’s a way to take all the trials of life and turn them into a series of mechanics, both to deal with my pain in the way my artistic leanings allow me to, and to have people go “Wow, that was hard,” so I can turn around and say: “Yeah, it was.” ’
It’s not only independent creators who are willing to externalise their struggles in this way. Papo & Yo is a fantasy adventure game released in 2012 that was part-funded by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game was created by a team of developers led by creative director Vander Caballero, who, at the start of the game, dedicates the work to ‘my mother, brothers and sister, with whom I survived the monster in my father.’
Papo & Yo begins with a rooftop chase, your schoolboy character pursuing a girl through streets filled with the mundane—wilting plants in terracotta pots, discarded footballs—but underpinned by heavy magic. Arcane symbols chalked on walls conjure staircases where there were none, while concrete walls peel back to reveal bright, ethereal nooks and cellars.
Move a discarded box two feet to the left and the building in front of you might just move in kind. It’s the kind of awesome power that only a child would apply in such a modest manner—creating pathways through the city where there were none in order to win a game of chase. It’s innocent and beguiling, and it acts as a metaphor for the greater message: a boy trying his best to navigate and change the landscape of an indifferent, harsh environment.
Soon enough you meet the monster that represents Caballero’s father’s alcoholism, a lumbering, ugly giant who is entirely docile at rest, but who becomes enraged when he licks one of the frogs that pepper the game world.
The story is lightly told, the cut-scenes sparse, and the dialogue fleeting. Every so often, the director breaks to a flashback, a scene that makes clear the tragic consequence of his father’s addiction in real life. But the gentle tone elsewhere ensures that the moments when the elephant in the room is addressed are all the more affecting.
‘He cannot control himself,’ says the boy after the monster’s first uncontrollable rage—one part statement of fact, one part defence.
‘There is a cure,’ says his companion, a young girl.
‘Cure? How?’ he asks her.
‘Only you can cure the monster.’
‘But I don’t know anything,’ he pleads.
It’s unclear whether the scene is supposed to be a conversation between the boy and his conscience—that hopeful, yearning side to any child who lives with a parent who cannot control their demons. But this is inescapably a game about a child trying to save the unsaveable, assuming a confused role and an impossible task that no child should ever have to take on, and yet which so many do.
When asked by a journalist why he chose to turn his experiences into a game, Caballero said: ‘It was my love for games, I think. When I was a kid and going through difficult times, games actually saved me. It was the only space where I could be in control and experience safety, and predictability in a way. Everything outside was crazy.’
As with That Dragon, Cancer, there’s a sense of discomfort when playing Papo & Yo. You have been invited into a cathartic exercise (Caballero’s therapist even makes a cameo in the game). When film directors work out their grief, anger, or resentment on the screen, you spectate. With Papo & Yo, you participate in this therapeutic endeavour, and while that can lead to a sense of disquiet, it also elicits empathy as you enter into the healing process.
For Green, Reid, and Caballero, game-making has been a way to externalise their experiences, a way, perhaps, to recreate the situation in virtual form so that it can be examined, replayed, maybe even controlled. It seems clear that the medium’s power is not only in allowing us to experience the world from another’s perspective, but also in providing us with a way to replay our own experiences in order to better understand them, much like a patient in a psychotherapist’s chair, revisiting past moments in a safe place.
If video games are able to help us to understand complex systems and positions in life that are different to our own, it’s logical that some would try to use them as a way to make sense of their grief and trauma and to invite others into their experience. The creators of Papo & Yo, Dear Mother, and That Dragon, Cancer have decided to make their games public. In this way and to different degrees of vulnerability—and, arguably, success—they share their burden, life, and story with others.
But therapeutic game-making is not only a performative art. In some cases, it’s both deeply personal and entirely private.
In the autumn of 2006, the game designer Brenda Romero suffered what she describes as a severe assault. In the weeks following the attack she lay numb in bed.
‘I chain-watched Grey’s Anatomy because I couldn’t think,’ she said during a talk entitled ‘The prototyping of tragedy’ delivered at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, the only time that she has spoken publicly, albeit in brief, about the attack. Her mind, she recalled at the time, was immobile in the shadow of one unanswerable question: ‘Why the fuck would someone like that do something like this to someone like me?’
After a while lying with the pain and confusion, she began to tackle the question in the only way that she knew how: through game design.
‘I didn’t want to live with this thing in me, so I started to explore pain and evil as a system,’ she tells me. ‘I started designing a video-game level in my head. I thought maybe this would help me to understand.’
That Romero would try to make sense of her trauma within the framework of a game is, she says today, entirely understandable.
‘When you join the games industry at the age of fifteen, it’s the way that you make sense of the world. If I were a musician I might write a song. If I were a writer I might write an article. But I am a game designer: I have to process systemically.’
As the weeks passed, more games began to come to Romero, games that sought to explain the systems that drove the world’s tragedies and injustices both contemporary and historical: the slave trade, Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in the seventeenth century and that most imponderable of all humanity’s great blights: the Holocaust. Her suffering seeded in her a new approach to game design, a hopeful way to make sense of the senseless.
Then, in 2009, she played The Path, a psychological horror game inspired in part by the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, and another of the art games released by Endless Forest creators Tale of Tales.
‘There’s a part in the woods when a guy walks up to you,’ she recalls. ‘The only thing I could think was: “Fuck, I am going to get raped.” ’
It was a feeling that Romero had not experienced in a video game before.
‘It was a painful and repellent trigger,’ she says now, ‘but for reasons I don’t recall, I didn’t shut down and shut out. For some reason, I stayed there and felt through it … and I began to feel some kind of relief, some kind of peace.’
Romero has been working on video games for most of her life. She joined Sir Tech, a developer based in Ogdensburg, a small dairy town on the outskirts of New York, in 1981 at the age of fifteen. Romero—née Garno—spent the next twenty years working at the company, first manning the tips phone line to give gamers who were stuck in one of the company’s games guidance, and later as a game designer and programmer. In 1987, she met John Romero, the co-creator of the seminal first-person shooter Doom and the man who, twenty-five years later, she would marry.
Just one year before the attack she spoke about at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, Romero was working on a crass Playboy game. A few years later, Train, Romero’s board game about the systemic and systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi death camps, was celebrated by a rabbi as a work of Torah, a part of the canon of Jewish teaching and culture. She has become game designer in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media. But despite all of this success, today, after she returns home from her day job at the social-game company Loot Drop, which she co-founded with her husband in 2010, she works on Black Box.
‘It’s the game with which I wanted to first understand evil systems and the bad things that happen to us,’ she says, a ‘Ground Zero’ game, from which all of the others have sprung.
Black Box is the last of a suite of six deeply personal games, which Romero groups together under the title ‘The mechanic is the message.’ Each of the games is a physical creation, something between a board game and an art installation, and in each case the player is provided with a framing narrative, but free to draw their own conclusions.
To date, three have been made public: The New World, a game about slavery created in 2008; Síochán leat (Gaelic for ‘Peace be with you’), Romero’s 2009 release about Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland; and, most famously, Train, the board game about the Holocaust.
In Train, the player is presented with a set of miniature train tracks and sixty small yellow pegs that represent people. The player is asked to efficiently load those people onto the trains. You can follow the rules, if you wish, but maybe you don’t have to. At the point at which the player successfully completes the game, they overturn a card that reveals the train’s destination: Auschwitz. The player’s high of winning is immediately punctured by the stark realisation that they have been complicit in loading Jews into boxcars (one yellow peg represents 100,000 Jews) en route to the infamous concentration camp where 1.1 million were killed in gas chambers or burned in ovens during the Second World War.
Romero researched the Holocaust extensively. Each day during the nine months that it took to design Train, she stared at a picture of two boys wearing the Star of David that the Nazis required that Jews wear for identification. She imagined that she was the boys’ mother. She’d mentally straighten their clothes. She’d project.
Most feel shame when they play the game. Some hide, some cry, some attempt to subvert the rules. Holocaust survivors have played Train. For Romero, post-2006, tragic subject matter is not taboo.
‘You can’t have human tragedy at any scale without a system,’ she says. ‘And if you give me a system, I can make you a game.’
Some have not shared her point of view. ‘I had people telling me I should fucking leave the games industry,’ she tells me, ‘or that I should be punched in the face, or that they hope I realise how much pain I’ve brought to people.’ Many others, including the rabbi, responded more positively. The game was featured in museums, lauded by educators, and given a Vanguard award at the IndieCade festival for ‘pushing the boundaries of game design and showing us what games can do.’
Having explored human tragedy at the macro scale, now, at last, Romero is circling Black Box, the most ‘difficult’ game in the series and the most localised and personal. It’s a game designed to be played one time, by one player. Romero intends to be that player. Once the game has been played, it cannot be played again, although others will be able to view the endgame state.
‘Black Box is about the worst experience of my life,’ she says. ‘I am not going to talk about what the game is about; that’s why it’s in a black box. When I finish the game, I may invite several of my friends and explain what it’s about.’
For Romero, these are the games that she has to birth into the world, to get them out of her. Black Box has cost more than a thousand dollars to make, and it’s something that cannot be sold. It’s played inside a two-foot-by-two-foot black Plexiglas cube. It sits on a platform and is subtly lit from underneath. ‘When you look inside, you can see forty figures,’ she explains.
‘In the centre of these figures is a smaller one. On top of the black box is an adding machine. The adding machine says 1, 4, 5, 10, 10, 10, then it says 40 and repeats that number endlessly on the paper as it spills down to the floor.’
Romero’s kitchen is currently littered with inch-tall figures, tokens that will be used in the game, the debris of her memory, slowly being ordered and arranged into game form. It seems to be a way to, if not to make sense of evil, then at least to place it within a system where it can be controlled and mastered.
This is, for many, the great appeal of all games: to experience a reality that runs on unflinching logic and justice, where the rules are never broken, where randomness can be contained and tamed. As Caballero put it, in the midst of chaos, games are sometimes the only available space where one can be in control and experience safety and predictability.
But it’s more than that, too: these games elicit not only understanding, but also personal healing. We have seen how video games offer a compelling and comforting refuge from life’s trials. But escapism isn’t their only offering. For their creators, they can also offer a way to process grief, trauma, and turmoil; a safe prism in which to experience or, at least, move towards healing.
And for those of us who choose to enter into the game-maker’s story, there’s an opportunity to understand and perhaps move towards healing some of our own wounds too.