I can't find better words than these to describe the game's premise:

Have a read of Jenn Frank's preview. Not only is the game powerful, but the preview is one of the best I've ever read. http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/05/that-dragon-cancer/

 

I don't think I get it. It's a game where you're the parent of a kid with cancer or something? And you are in the ICU watching him struggle vs his illness? What do you do exactly? Sounds super fun. Not sure I see how it's a game.

 

Okay fine games are art can we go back to games being fun please?

 

See: all casual games ever.

If somebody wants to tell a story using the video game format, why bitch? It is not like it will impinge upon the stream of angry birds sequels you apparently want.

My biggest fear is about the low-ply ascetic they are going for. It looks cool in concept art, but it seems like that might get irritating in-game. Still, as a whole the game sounds promising.

 

Oh please. Equating dislike of this with Angry Birds is a dumb leap in logic and you know it.

I'm not against games trying to push the boundaries and such, as long as they can balance being innovative with being fun, but in this case I'm not seeing a whole lot that would even make this a game yet. Looks more like a waiting room simulator unless I'm missing something.

 

I'm sensing a suspicious lack of dragons.

 

The assumption that games have to be fun is like assuming all film needs to be rom-coms and action flics. Just because historically games have been limited to a very minimal emotional palate doesn't mean we need to be stuck with it.

There isn't anything wrong with Angry Birds. It is a terrific game, if you define a game as a breed of competitive puzzle. But the modern game doesn't have to be a simple series of puzzles. We can actually tell stories now, invoke emotions that were too subtle for the technology and too radical for the market just years ago. Now that someone has made a tragic, personal story, which could be able to use the intense empathy video games are able to evoke to its fullest extent, you want more fun? You might as well go play Angry Birds. That is apparently all you need.

I really would prefer to avoid the 'games vs. interactive media' talk, because that semantic bullshit drives me up the wall.

 

Choke on a dick. There's a middle ground between angry birds and watching-your-infant-son-slowly-die-of-cancer simulators. Spec Ops: The Line managed to tackle some extremely heavy themes while still being a moderately fun shooter, and Far Cry 3 was an extremely fun shooter while still tackling some themes of medium weight. Skyrim built a geopolitical scenario that we're still arguing about. The Bioshock series is incredibly fun, has a good story, and supplies more than enough navel-gazing for the entire medium. The Walking Dead (the Telltale Games adventure, not the FPS) was a deep character-driven drama neck-deep in tragedy and loss and still found the time to shotgun zombies in the face.

Video games are a blend of artistic story-telling and interactive entertainment. Emphasis on entertainment. Different mediums do different things well and the angsty tragic shtick they've got going on here is better suited to a book or a film. The first time you clip into an oncologist and fall through the floor or have the baby's writhe-in-agony script bug out and tilt them at a 90-degree angle the entire atmosphere is going to be shot. Video games have dramatic moments in cutscenes because video game engines have a habit of not cooperating at the worst time, so if you try to make a game that's all dramatic moments you're going to either fail or you're going to have a game that's all cutscenes, in which case make a damn movie.

I get that it's based on the true story of the developers, but why are they making a video game about it? Why not just write a book or put up a website? Oh wait, they've written a book, which they advertise on the video game's about section. They've got a website, where they further advertise the book. They even sell an ebook at a 'pay what you want' price, which is a masterstroke in dancing around the word 'donate'. Seems they've got all their bases covered when it comes to monetizing the slow, painful death of their son.

 

Going by the review, it seems that the game is a point and click. A beautiful one, but still a point and click. Their webpage says that's only part of the game. You click on something, and you get cutscenes so you don't have to listen to a child crying. And you keep doing this until there is nothing left to click.

But I just don't see the appeal there. Especially as it seems that nothing you do matters. You click around until you've clicked everything, and then you pray for your son's survival. It's on tracks, like a lot of games, but you don't actually do anything. Like that one flash game a few years back where your character just walked, to decent music, across a randomly generated landscape. 2d sidescroller, but with no jump, no chance of dying, and no obstacles. Just exploring random changes.

It sounds like interactive art, but from what I've read, I wouldn't call it a game.
I'll maybe keep an ear open on this, but I can't imagine buying it unless things change radically, or I've incredibly misunderstood

 

I would say all games have to be fun, in the sense that you should be able to derive some form of enjoyment from it. Tragedies or horror movies are still meant to be entertaining to the viewer. Even educational movies and books have something in them to derive enjoyment from in some fashion, or at least the good ones do. What is considered fun is of course subjective, but enjoyment is the very purpose of any game. If you're not entertained then you're not playing a game, you're just doing boring work. There has to be something you're actually getting out of it that makes you want to keep playing it.

With that said, I don't see much entertainment to be derived from this game, unless, again, I'm missing something. I'm not going to say that no one could possibly derive enjoyment from this, since everyone has different ideas on what they consider fun, but I certainly don't, and that seems to be the case for a lot of people here. Frankly I just don't get it. Apparently you walk around a room, touch random shit and listen to a kid die. That doesn't sound deep, it sounds fucked up.

 

Spec Ops: the Line, Far Cry 3, Skyrim, and Bioshock are great games. They are also all Action-Adventure. Just as we probably don't want to watch only superhero films simply because the Avengers was pretty sweet, video games don't have to stick to the same genres they have been forced into.

The Western artistic tradition goes back to the Greeks, who had two forms of drama, tragedy and comedy. Comedy was fun, where peasants ran around delivering puns and waving gigantic prop penises everywhere. Tragedy, on the other hand, was about watching some important person have their life ripped to pieces by the gods. It wasn't fun, but it would provide some deeper and more meaningful emotional release. Games have been shallow for a long time, because they were puzzles more than they were stories for so much of their development. But now, we actually have the option of tragedy, of deep and meaningful emotional release. We don't need to stay stuck on guns and points and superpowers.

Just because of the inevitable creep towards commercial security and critical mediocrity does not mean that we need to let everything be made safe and accessible and fun. It means that, if we want novelty and innovation and a development of the form, we need to get behind the weird motherfuckers that try to make a game about waiting for a child to die. If the game turns out to phenomenally boring or disposable or generally undeserving of the hype, then we forget the game and will stop supporting the people who made it. But to say that it shouldn't be made because we like our shooters seems stupidly complacent.

 

In the (paraphrased) immortal words of our Lord and Saviour, Batman:

"This isn't a game."

 

The line is that even tragedies are enjoyable.

How is a point-and-click about a child dieing from cancer, where you have no options to help, going to be enjoyable?

 

I'm getting the overwhelming impression that the enjoyment is garnered not from playing the game, but by lording your oh so clearly superior tastes over the unrefined proletariat.

 

Enjoyable is the wrong word. I'm not expecting That Dragon to be a pleasant and delightful experience. Tragedies are not enjoyable. They don't make you happy. You get little pleasure from watching or experiencing them. For example, The Remains of the Day, the 1993 drama with Anthony Hopkins, is not interested in something titillating to pass the time. It instead very intentionally builds a character whose entire life and purpose is reduced to worthlessness. It shows the capriciousness of the universe and the terror of the human condition. Tragedy allows the miserable isolation of being human to be surpassed, if only for the duration of a movie or a play-through of a game. If That Dragon, Cancer wants to share an understanding of the world as hard and cruel and yet still holding on to some small iota of meaning and hope, why not let them? What is gained by demanding games be 'fun'?

There is nothing wrong with fun. I am 100% for more games like Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops: the Line. But we have more room than ever for weird shit like Actual Sunlight. Why not embrace that? Saying that 'games = x' or throwing around terms like 'interactive art' means that small, personal games are ghettoized and that we expect less from everything else.

 

I beg to differ. Let's talk about some of the most famous tragedies in the world shall we? I enjoy reading Shakespeare's tragedies, whichever it be. Why? Because they are intriguing, because they keep you on edge and make you think and speculate, because they excite you, and in a point most relevant to the topic, because you are not in control.

Imagine how fun it would be if some one put a gun to your head in real life, and only let you make the choices that leads to your child dying. Because that's what this sound like to me. It sounds like Spec Ops: the Line. Except Spec Ops could be called a game because it gave you a gun and let you shoot people.

 

It doesn't even sounds like a game.

And I'm not talking about the whole entertainment thing (wich it will fail at) or the whole innovation debate (it will fail in a new way, sure). I'm talking about wether or not it can really be considered a game.

From what I have read you click on things to have cutscenes. Your actions mean nothing, there is no changes depending on how you "play" the game, you just click on cutscenes until you have seen them all.

It's not a game, it's a film where you choose the order of the scenes.

 

People on this forum talk a lot of shit.

Who ever said a game has to be fun? There is a reason that Romeo and Juliet is one of the most enduringly popular pieces of western fiction and there's nothing 'fun' about it. If you only interact with things that are entertaining at a level of 'fun' then you've got to go and throw out pretty much every major piece of art that humanity has ever created. Schindler's List? Fuck that shit. Mona Lisa? Just fucking smile, bitch. Moonlight Sonata? Cheer up you gloomy fuck.

Saying that you want all games to be fun is like saying you want all paintings to be Warhols. It's straight up retarded. You're as dumb as the people calling The Passage the best game ever made. Shock horror, some people want their art to make them feel other emotions sometimes.

And to the people saying this isn't a game; well fuck Monkey Island then. And The Walking Dead. All that is is clicking around on a screen until something happens, right? In fact, throw out pretty much every game that has ever been made, because that's just clicking and pressing buttons to make things on the screen react in a predictable way. Half Life? All that happens is that you click on things and they display a death animation. Starcraft? Well all that happens is that you click on things and then they perform some preordained task.

PS. This game is dog shit, but aside from Tehan, you've all levelled bullshit arguments at it.

 

Why do you make such a big distinction between entertainment and fun? Your entire argument seems to ride on that. Frankly I don't see the difference. You enjoy something -- it could be a tragedy or an action movie, doesn't matter -- so you're entertained. Therefore you found it fun. Simple. You seem to place this "lighthearted and whimsical" clause to the word fun, but would this mean that someone who has fun shooting cops and civilians in GTA isn't having "real" fun?

With Monkey Island and The Walking Dead you accomplish goals. You interact with people. Your input affects the game. (Well, presumably. To be honest I haven't played either of those games yet.) With this game we're talking about, apparently nothing you do effects anything at even the most basic level. I mean there's not even something like giving the kid pills to stop him from crying or anything. Nothing is accomplished. It's something that seems far more suited to a short film.

 

Well yes, any argument can be refuted if you amalgamate two words so they mean the same thing. Hey guys, by the way I've achieved world peace by amalgamating the two words peace and war. Pretty nifty, eh?

Also, whoever said that killing cops and civilians in GTA isn't fun? If anything, a huge aspect of GTA has to be lighthearted and whimsical— otherwise it is entirely horrific.

Pleasure, entertainment, fun; all of these words have different connotations and definitions. That is why I treat them as different concepts— because they are different.

I completely agree with this last statement, but this is only a worse version of what Tehan said above. This is not a narrative suited to the medium, but that doesn't mean it isn't a game. It just means it's a bad one. This is essentially just a more simplistic variation on the Monkey Island games. There is generally a series of things that have a solution. In Monkey Island you progress the linear plot by clicking everything on everything with little rhyme and reason until you find the required combination. In this you just click. I don't really see much difference.