A video game to cope with grief | Amy Green

114,005 views ・ 2017-05-17

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
Two months ago, my kids and I huddled around a cell phone
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watching the live stream of the Game Awards,
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one of the video game industry's biggest nights.
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They announced the nominees for the Game for Impact,
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an award that's given to a thought-provoking video game
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with a profound prosocial message or meaning.
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They opened the envelope
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and they read the title of our video game.
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An award ...
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for impact.
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It was almost funny, actually,
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because I always thought that winning an award like that
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would have this huge impact on my life,
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but I found that the opposite is true.
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The big nights,
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the accomplishments --
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they fade.
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But the hardest nights of my life have stuck with me,
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impacting who I am
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and what I do.
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In 2010, my third son, Joel, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor.
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And before that year was finished,
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doctors sat my husband and I down
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and let us know that his tumor had returned
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despite the most aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that they could offer him.
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On that terrible night,
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after learning that Joel had perhaps four months to live,
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I cuddled up with my two older sons in bed --
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they were five and three at the time --
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and I never really knew how much they understood,
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so I started telling them a bedtime story.
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I told them about this very brave knight named Joel
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and his adventure fighting a terrible dragon called cancer.
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Every night, I told them more of the story,
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but I never let the story end.
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I was just building up a context that they could understand
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and hoping that our prayers would be answered
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and I would never have to tell them that that knight,
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who had fought so bravely,
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was done fighting
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and could rest now, forever.
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Fortunately, I never did have to finish that bedtime story.
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My children outgrew it.
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Joel responded better than anyone expected to palliative treatment,
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and so instead of months,
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we spent years learning how to love our dying child with all of our hearts.
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Learning to recognize that shameful feeling
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of holding back just a little love
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to try to spare ourselves just a little pain
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somewhere further down the road.
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We pushed past that self-preservation
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because Joel was worth loving even if that love could crush us.
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And that lesson of intense vulnerability has changed me ...
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more than any award ever could.
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We started living like Joel could live,
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and we began developing a video game called "That Dragon, Cancer."
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It was the story of Joel.
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It was the story of hope in the shadow of death.
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It was the story of faith
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and doubt,
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and the realization that a wrestle with doubt is a part of faith --
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maybe the biggest part of it.
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It was a story that began as a miracle
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and ended as a memorial.
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(Music)
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(Giggle)
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(Clapping)
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(Music)
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(Video) Dad: Bouncing around, do you like that?
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(Giggle)
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I love your giggle.
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(Music)
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(Giggle)
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[A Journey of Hope In the Shadow of Death]
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[That Dragon, Cancer]
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(Music)
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When you play "That Dragon, Cancer,"
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you're transformed into a witness of Joel's life,
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exploring an emotional landscape,
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clicking to discover more of what we as a family felt and experienced.
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It feels a little bit like analyzing interactive poetry
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because every game mechanic is a metaphor,
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and so the more the player asks themselves
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what we as designers were trying to express and why,
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the richer the experience becomes.
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We took that vulnerability that Joel taught us,
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and we encoded the game with it.
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Players expect their video games to offer them branching narrative
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so that every decision that they make feels important
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and can change the outcome of the game.
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We subverted that principle of game design,
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collapsing the choices in on the player
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so that they discover for themselves
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that there is nothing that they can do that will change the outcome for Joel.
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And they feel that discovery as deeply and desperately as we felt it
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on nights when we held Joel in our arms praying for hours,
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stubbornly holding out hope for a grace that we could not create for ourselves.
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We'd all prefer to win,
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but when you discover that you can't win,
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what do you value instead?
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I never planned to write video games,
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but these moments that really change our lives,
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they often come as the result of our hardship -- and not our glory.
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When we thought that Joel could live,
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I left the game designing to my husband.
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I chimed in here and there
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with a scene or two and some suggestions.
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But after the night that Joel died,
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the passion,
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the possibility of sharing Joel's life through our video game --
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it was something that I couldn't resist.
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I started writing more,
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I sat in on our team's design meetings,
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I added more ideas and I helped direct scenes.
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And I discovered that creating a video game is telling a story,
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but with an entirely new vocabulary.
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All the same elements of imagination and symbolism are there,
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but they're just partnered with player agency
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and system responsiveness.
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It's challenging work.
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I have to think in a totally new way to do it,
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but I love it.
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And I wouldn't have known that without Joel.
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Maybe you're a little surprised
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by our choice to share our story of terminal cancer through a video game.
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Perhaps you're even thinking like so many people before you:
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cancer is not a game.
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Well, tell that to any pediatric cancer parent
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that's ever taken an exam glove and blown it up into a balloon,
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or transformed a syringe into a rocket ship,
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or let their child ride their IV pole through the hospital halls
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like it was a race car.
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Because when you have children,
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everything is a game.
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And when your young child experiences something traumatic,
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you work even harder to make sure that their life feels like a game
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because children naturally explore their worlds through play.
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While cancer can steal many things from a family,
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it shouldn't steal play.
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If you're listening to me and you're trying to imagine this family
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that revolves entirely around a dying child,
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and you can't imagine joy as part of that picture,
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then we were right to share our story with you,
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because that season of our life was hard.
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Unspeakably hard at times,
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but it was also pure hope,
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deep love
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and joy like I have never experienced since.
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Our video game was our attempt to share that world
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with people who hadn't experienced it before,
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because we never could imagine that world until it became ours.
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We made a video game that's hard to play.
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It will never be a blockbuster.
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People have to prepare themselves to invest emotionally
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in a story that they know will break their hearts.
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But when our hearts break,
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they heal a little differently.
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My broken heart has been healing with a new and a deeper compassion --
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a desire to sit with people in their pain,
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to hear their stories and try to help tell them
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so that they know that they're seen.
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On the night when "That Dragon, Cancer" won the Game for Impact Award,
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we cheered,
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we smiled and we talked about Joel
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and the impact he had on our life --
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on all of those hard and hopeful nights that we shared with him
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when he changed our hearts
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and taught us so much more about life and love and faith and purpose.
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That award will never mean as much to me as even a single photograph of my son,
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but it does represent all of the people who his life has impacted,
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people I'll never meet.
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They write me emails sometimes.
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They tell me that they miss Joel, even though they never met him.
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They describe the tears that they've shed for my son,
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and it makes my burden of grief just a little bit lighter
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knowing that it's shared with a 10-year-old
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watching a YouTube playthrough,
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or a doctor playing on his airplane with a smartphone,
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or a professor introducing Joel to her first-year philosophy students.
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We made a video game that's hard to play.
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But that feels just right to me,
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because the hardest moments of our lives
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change us more than any goal we could ever accomplish.
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Tragedy has shifted my heart
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more than any dream I could ever see come true.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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