A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever

They wait somberly in line: cosplayers, young women, middle-aged men. They sit in front of the monitor, put on the Bose noise-canceling headphones, and pick up the Xbox controller. Fifteen minutes later they stand and push back from the table. Many of them affect sheepish grins, rise quietly, walk off abruptly without making eye contact. A few get misty-eyed, clearly shaken, collecting themselves before they leave. And then there’s the developer who starts weeping and says, “I don’t want to be here at PAX; I want to be home with my kids.” The couple whose own daughter survived cancer and who have followed the game’s development for years. The boy who staggers away from the screen as if emerging from a particularly punishing roller coaster.

“Are you OK?” Green asks.

“It’s just so sad,” the boy says in a hushed tone, staring off. He wanders away, dazed. A few minutes later he returns to collect the backpack he has inadvertently left behind.

Green, on the other hand, doesn’t at this moment appear particularly haunted or upset. He stands in front of his booth with the studied casualness of someone who knows that people nearby are talking about him. His burly figure would be imposing if he weren’t dressed in cargo shorts and flip-flops, a wardrobe that—along with his sunny, authoritative demeanor—gives him the air of a summer camp director. Despite the circumstances, he is happy to be here.

An experienced programmer, Green is relatively new to the indie-game world. Until recently, he worked full-time designing software for a Denver-based dialysis company, a job he held for 11 years. In 2008, just before Joel was born, Green, who had long dabbled in filmmaking, poetry, and art, decided to try his hand at game-making. He spent his evenings and weekends learning how to use the Torque game engine and cranking out silly iPhone trifles with names like Sir Roly Poly and Little Piñata. They didn’t sell well, but Green enjoyed making them. He had always fantasized about pursuing a creative career, and he and Amy hatched a plan to save up enough money for him to quit his job after a few years and build games full-time.

That Dragon, Cancer explores spiritual and existential quandaries that have haunted humanity since Job.

When the Greens received Joel’s first cancer diagnosis in January 2010, that creative outlet became more important to Ryan, even as it grew more difficult for him to pursue. The Greens live in Loveland, Colorado, about an hour from Joel’s oncologists in Denver, and Ryan found his schedule overtaken by late-night trips to the emergency room and overnight stays in the ICU, wrestling with feeding tubes and chemotherapy pills, juggling childcare for the Greens’ other children, and all the other logistical, emotional, and psychological challenges that come with tending to a seriously sick child. Ryan’s boss told him to take as much time as he needed, and he ratcheted back to working about 30 hours a week. At the same time, he found himself taking on contract game-design work, something to keep him creatively engaged during those long and terrifying months.

Then, just under a year later, Joel was declared terminal. The news caused Green to reassess his life. The dialysis company was giving him paid time off and the flexibility to take care of his family, and he was using it to work for somebody else. He was one month away from a $30,000 retention bonus—money that was crucial to his plan to strike out on his own—but he couldn’t stomach the idea of accepting it under such pretenses. Over the protests of his employer, he quit.

“Everybody around me was like, ‘Don’t fall on your sword, you don’t have to do this,’” Green says. “I don’t want it to sound more noble than it was, but it just felt like a moment where I could have some integrity.”

“You think, ‘Ugh, I kind of hate this, but I get it,’” Amy says. “Both of us at that point were like, ‘Let’s do what you’re passionate about and not just get through life. Let’s make decisions we love.’”

For Green, that meant making games that explored religious themes. He started doing full-time contract work for Soma Games, a Newberg, Oregon-based developer of Christian videogames. In late 2010 he met Larson, an indie-game veteran from Des Moines, Iowa. Larson, another devoted Christian, had been spending time on a “not-games” forum, an online discussion for developers interested in avoiding all the usual gamelike trappings—the puzzles and quests and levels—to discover what else the medium might be capable of. I Wish I Were the Moon was a clickable tone poem about lost love. Proteus had players wander around an interactive landscape. Larson says his interest in not-games was purely intellectual, not spiritual, but the effort to move beyond performance-based reward systems seems to track with some of his deeply held philosophical beliefs. “The idea of grace is that you don’t have to do something good to earn your salvation,” he says. “People are always so concerned about what you do in a game, and they can be that way about life too. Whereas some people, depending on what kind of faith they have or what kind of person they are, that’s not necessarily what defines them.”

A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever | WIRED.

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