Gaming as Grief Processing: What That Dragon Cancer and Spiritfarer Teach Us

Ryan Green made That Dragon, Cancer while his son Joel was dying. Joel was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer before his first birthday and died at five. Green and his wife built the game over four years, using game development partly as a way to understand and document their experience. The result is something that barely resembles a game in the conventional sense: it is closer to an interactive memorial, and it is one of the most emotionally affecting things ever made in the medium. Spiritfarer, released in 2020 by Thunder Lotus Games, approaches death differently. You play a ferry master transporting spirits of the recently deceased to the afterlife, caring for them, building them homes on your boat, cooking them food, listening to their stories, and eventually holding them while they pass through the final gate. The game is quiet and deliberate. It was partly inspired by the developers' own experiences of losing family members and wanting to make something that engaged honestly with what grief actually felt like. Both games belong to a growing category that is challenging assumptions about what games are for and what they can do with difficult emotional territory.

What Play Gives Grief That Other Forms Don't

Literature and film have long been considered legitimate venues for processing grief. We accept that a novel about loss can help a reader locate their own feelings in someone else's story. Film accomplishes something similar. But these are passive forms — the audience receives the experience without agency. Games change the relationship in ways that matter for processing. When you are holding a spirit in Spiritfarer and watching them pass, you are not watching someone else make a choice. You are making the choice to be present, to let go, to do the thing that is right even though it hurts. That agency — even in a game with gentle, low-stakes mechanics — creates a different kind of emotional engagement than passive witnessing. Researchers at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies have studied interactive narrative as a therapeutic tool and found that participants who engaged with emotionally difficult content through interactive formats showed higher rates of self-reported insight and emotional integration than those who engaged with equivalent content in passive formats. The ability to pause, replay, approach at your own pace, and make choices seemed to support rather than distance the emotional processing.

The Language Game Made Available

One of the specific things grief is hard to talk about is that its texture doesn't translate well into ordinary language. You can say you miss someone. You can describe the specific things you miss. But the feeling itself — the particular weight of absence in specific circumstances — resists description. Games offer a representational language that is different from verbal or visual language. The spatial experience of exploring a dying child's hospital room in That Dragon, Cancer, moving through it slowly, clicking on objects, listening to audio that layered memory over memory — this creates a kind of meaning that neither a written memoir nor a documentary could produce in exactly the same way. The body is involved. Navigation is involved. The meaning is partly spatial. This is not mystical. It is the ordinary fact that different forms produce different kinds of understanding. Poetry does things prose cannot. Music does things language cannot. Games do things other forms cannot, and grief is one of the subjects where that difference is most consequential.

The Care Work of Spiritfarer

What distinguishes Spiritfarer from most gaming experiences is its insistence on care as the core mechanic. You don't fight things. You tend to them. You learn what each spirit likes to eat, what they want to talk about, what they need from you before they're ready to let go. The game models the kind of attention that caring for a dying person actually requires. Players who have lost people — and the game's community is notable for how openly its members discuss their grief — frequently describe the experience of playing through a spirit's departure as a rehearsal or a rite. One of the game's spirits is modeled on the creative director's uncle. Playing through that character's final moments, knowing the context, does something to the player that is not easily dismissed as entertainment. A tangent: hospice care workers who were consulted during the game's development noted that the game's mechanics — patience, presence, attention to specific preferences, the willingness to let go when the person is ready rather than when you are — mapped onto actual best practices for end-of-life care in ways that were both accidental and meaningful. The game had arrived at something true without trying to be educational.

Playing Through What We Can't Say

The question of whether games can be therapeutic is separate from the question of whether they're good art about grief. On the second question, That Dragon, Cancer and Spiritfarer have largely settled the argument. They are serious works engaging seriously with universal human experience. On the first question, the evidence is building. Not as a replacement for grief counseling or community support, but as one more way that people find to be with their loss — to sit with it, move through it, hold it in a form they can navigate at their own pace. Sometimes what grief needs is not a conversation but a space. These games built one.