A video game to cope with grief

An independent documentary created by David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall about our family and the making of That Dragon, Cancer.

A long form article about the video game written by Jason Tanz for Wired Magazine.

A podcast created by Reply All that also aired on Radio Lab about the struggle we had finishing the video game.

One of my favorite theological books, written by C. S. Lewis. This is the first book Ryan and I read together after Joel died. It wrestles with one of the greatest questions of faith: "How could a good God allow pain and suffering?"

A film created by Terrence Malick that artfully explores human suffering in the wake of eternity. This has always been a favorite film of my husband, Ryan Green. A shared love of Malick’s work unites our game development team, and the beautiful symbolic work in Tree of Life certainly inspired our approach to an autobiographical videogame about faith and suffering.

A very favorite book of mine. Mary Doria Russell wrestles with faith and suffering in the context of the silence of God, but within the genre most suited to all of humanity's greatest questions, science fiction. Ryan and I love this book and its sequel. We find reflections of ourselves in the questions it asks and the answers the characters reluctantly discover.

A shining example of an autobiographical video game that explores a difficult topic. That Dragon, Cancer is not the first videogame to explore personal and challenging themes through game mechanics. We want people to know about the other great work being done within videogames. Vander Caballero, along with his team at Minority Media, created Papo & Yo as an exploration of his childhood overshadowed by his alcoholic father. This game is largely credited as creating a new genre of videogames and certainly paved the way for titles like That Dragon, Cancer.