The models have a slightly alien quality nevertheless, and one that feeds into the shifting visual landscapes: the boy’s fingers and thin limbs have a shivering graphical effect that suggests un-reality, as if he’s not quite there.Ĭharacter dialogue and interior thoughts are scrawled across the environments, a visually-pleasing and practical effect. The characters are polygonal 3D models that, outside of hair and glasses, have no facial features – but are humanised through gestures, voice acting and ambient effects. The sense of distance is maintained first of all in TDC’s visual style. The game’s developers, Ryan and Amy Green, who began the project to cope with and discuss the death of their small son Joel, no doubt knew this to be the case. Cancer mixes an unwarranted mystique with straight-up terror, and so suits the kind of virtual space that video games can create – a world close enough to reality that it’s convincing, but one we can withdraw from at any time. In this, the game is something of a gateway to a hard topic, and the tragedy of its subject is edged by an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism. That Dragon, Cancer is itself a euphemism, a metaphor you’d use to explain something so terrible to a child. We’re terrified it might happen to us, and a whole industry of quacks and journalists play on it. We worry about raising it with those afflicted, of saying the wrong thing and causing offence. It’s not taboo but, as an internal disease that often remains private until near the end, it is a difficult topic. I still remember a careers teacher telling a class of bewildered teenagers that one-third of us would get cancer – he’d dropped the bomb about our parents “not being around forever” a few weeks previously.Ĭancer will either touch you or someone close to you – and so fear makes us uncomfortable with the topic. I say this not to jeer at a noble cause, but to show what an universal and intractable obsession the disease has become for our longer-lived societies.
While I was playing TDC, Barack Obama devoted a portion of his last State of the Union address to declaring war on cancer, a clarion call only slightly dampened by it being 45 years since the Nixon administration’s National Cancer Act promised the same. That Dragon, Cancer is in this lineage but the experience, losing a child to terminal illness, is so painful even in the abstract, you may at first wonder who would choose to share it. Indie developers have always used games to explore real-life topics from a personal perspective, whether that’s a life-changing event, or just settling in a new town. You don’t hear it so much now – partly because this sentiment resulted in a lot of pompously overwrought stuff like Heavy Rain, but partly there was a realisation that away from the mainstream industry, games have been doing it for years. I t was once trendy for major game developers to talk about how they would one day make players cry.
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