The Documentary About ‘That Dragon, Cancer’ Is Coming to Kickstarter

The directors of Thank You For Playing, a documentary about the making of That Dragon, Cancer, an extremely unique game about grief and childhood illness, have started a Kickstarter campaign in order to bring their film to wider audiences. The goal is to start conversations about new visions for what video games can be and what purpose they should serve.

The film, which garnered dozens of positive reviews, documents the story of a family’s unimaginable grief over the terminal cancer diagnosis of their son, and a father’s decision to make, of all things, a video game about it. The directors now want to bring that story to more people, ideally by incorporating the video game into screenings of the film.

“Our goal now is to combine the experience of playing the video game and watching our film into one room and one evening; to put two pieces of art existing in different mediums side by side, and see what sort of experiences and conversations emerge from that for an audience. It’s something special that we haven’t seen done very frequently and we’re very excited to see what comes of it,” David Osit, who directed the film with Malika Zouhali-Worrall, told me.

After learning that their one-year-old son, Joel, had cancer in 2010, Ryan and Amy Green embarked on a four year long journey to create a powerful game that serves as both a celebration of Joel’s life, and as a piece of artwork. It pushes the genre past what is normally expected from gaming, proving to players that not all video games have to be “fun” in order to be meaningful.

What makes the game different is that the problems it presents, like a child suffering in pain, are unsolvable, whereas most challenges in video games are easily surmounted via a gunshot or virtual key.

Osit and Zouhali-Worrall met the Greens in 2013, three years after Joel had been diagnosed. Their film captures the later stages of the making of the game, as well as many of the last moments of Joel’s life, before he passed away in early 2014.

The Greens shied away from none of their experiences while the film was being made, allowing the filmmakers to witness both mundane scenes in their home, as well as extremely intimate moments, like when Joel is receiving painful treatments in the hospital towards the end of his life. In all, the film asks us to really examine technology, and how we choose to use it to document those we love the most.

Thank You For Playing “grapples with our relationship to technology and how it’s capable of simultaneously encouraging and discouraging more human connections among people,” Osit told me.