通过电子游戏感受悲痛与希望的真实故事

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Two months ago, my kids and I huddled around a cell phone watching the livestream of the Game Awards, one of the video game industry's biggest nights. They announced the nominees for the Game for Impact, an award given to a thought-provoking video game with a profound pro-social message or meaning. They opened the envelope and read the title of our video game, winning the award for impact. It was almost funny because I always thought that winning an award like that would drastically change my life, but I found the opposite to be true. The big nights and accomplishments fade, but the hardest nights of my life have stuck with me, impacting who I am and what I deal with.

In 2010, my third son Joel was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor. Before that year ended, Dr. Sat, my husband, and I learned that his tumor had returned despite the most aggressive chemotherapy and radiation available. On that terrible night, after hearing that Joel might have only four months to live, I cuddled up with my two older sons in bed. They were five and three at the time, and I wasn’t sure how much they understood. So I started telling them a bedtime story about a brave knight named Joel and his adventure fighting a terrible dragon called cancer. Every night I told more of the story without ever finishing it, hoping our prayers would be answered and that I would never have to tell them that their hero had fallen. Fortunately, Joel responded better than expected to palliative treatment, giving us years to learn how to love him fully, despite the painful reality of his illness.

We learned to push past the instinct of self-preservation, embracing vulnerability, because Joel was worth loving even if it could crush us. This lesson of intense vulnerability changed me more than any award ever could. Inspired by Joel, we began developing a video game called That Dragon, Cancer. It told his story—a story of hope in the shadow of death, faith and doubt, and the realization that wrestling with doubt is a part of faith. The game began as a miracle and ended as a memorial. Players witness Joel's life, exploring an emotional landscape where every game mechanic acts as a metaphor. The richer the player reflects on what we tried to express, the deeper the experience becomes.

We intentionally subverted typical game design principles. Players often expect branching narratives where choices affect the outcome, but we collapsed choices to reveal that nothing could change Joel's fate. The player feels the same desperate helplessness we did, holding him in our arms and praying for a grace we could not create. Life-changing moments often arise from hardship rather than glory. After Joel's death, I joined the game development more fully, learning that video game creation requires a new vocabulary combining imagination, symbolism, player agency, and system responsiveness. It is challenging work but profoundly rewarding, teaching lessons that only Joel’s story could impart.

You might be surprised by our choice to share a story of terminal cancer through a video game. For families with children, play becomes a coping mechanism. Even when life is traumatic, children naturally explore through play, so we made their reality feel like a game. While cancer steals much from a family, it should never steal play. This period of our lives was unspeakably hard but also full of hope, love, and unexpected joy. Our game communicates this to those who cannot imagine such a world, asking players to emotionally invest in a story that may break their hearts but also teaches compassion.

On the night That Dragon, Cancer won the Game for Impact award, we celebrated, thinking of Joel and the impact he had on our lives. The award will never mean as much as a single photograph of him, but it represents all the people whose lives he touched. People I've never met write to say they miss him, that they shed tears for him. Sharing Joel through our game has allowed his story to reach far beyond our family. Our game is hard to play, but it feels right because the hardest moments of our lives are what change us, shaping compassion, love, and purpose in ways no dream or goal could.