Tag: grief

Review

Fragments of Him finds the everyday poetry of grief

It is very, very hard to talk about death and grief without falling into platitudes. But we have the elegy to save us from the cliché—that form of poem or writing that seeks to capture the abyssal depths of the writer’s despair over the absence of the departed and impart some singular meaning to that life and its end. Take, for example, the nineteenth-century poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote In Memoriam, A.H.H. (1849) in response to the sudden death of his closest friend and future brother-in-law sixteen years earlier. The book consists of over one hundred and thirty smaller…
Cho-am
News

A videogame about the impossibility of grieving for Pol Pot

“Much of the experience of the site takes place in one’s head,” says the itch.io page for Cho-am, a new game from Aaron Oldenburg. The site described is the place where Pol Pot—the brutal dictator behind the Cambodian genocide in the late 70s—was cremated. In “real life” Cambodia, this site is near the Thai border, and is host to a small shrine made up of a tin roof over a mound of ash and dirt. Sometimes it is decorated with flowers or incense. Cho-Am deals with the difficulty of understanding the way others process incomprehensible national trauma. Oldenburg writes of…
News

The game of grief

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. That Dragon, Cancer (PC, Mac) NUMINOUS GAMES Many people pretend to know how you should grieve. Endless self-help books and articles give instructions on what’s “normal” and “healthy” and “expected.” But in an actual experience of grief, you learn something much more terrifying: there are no rules for losing a loved one. No one knows how to get through it. That agonizing uncertainty is about the only commonality. Whether you scream or stay silent, feel numb or like you’re on fire—everyone grieves differently, each experience…
Review

The impossibility of sadness in That Dragon, Cancer

Art has always been useful for drawing our attention to the controversially sad. Take something like Zoe Quinn’s text adventure Depression Quest; depression is, by its nature, a miserable affliction, but it is also a diagnostic category burdened by stigma, shame, and skepticism. Some people insist that reliance on psychotherapy or medication is a sign of moral weakness, while others deny that clinical depression exists at all. Playing Quinn’s game and allowing yourself to feel sad therefore becomes a form of social action; to play is also to take a stand, placing yourself on one side of a debate. The…
News

That Dragon, Cancer expands its scope with Kickstarter relaunch

Joel Evan Green was diagnosed with a brain tumor at only twelve months of age. Doctors gave him four months to live. But he exceeded all medical expectations greatly, battling through multiple surgeries and another seven tumors. He lived on, strong, inside the sphere of love that his family had surrounded him in. They prayed, sung, and played with him, and Joel smiled back in the way that only infants can when experiencing pure joy.  When Joel was four years old, Ryan and Amy Green, his parents, started to recount their journey with Joel in a videogame. Prior to this,…