Based On A True Story: Games, Film and Cancer
In 2012, Ryan Green and Josh Larson began work on That Dragon, Cancer, a video game that acts as a living painting, a poem and interactive retelling of Ryan and Amy Green’s experience raising their son Joel, a 5-year-old who fought terminal cancer for 4 years before succumbing to the disease in 2014. In 2013, filmmakers David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall started documenting the development of the game and the remaining 9 months of Joel's life for their film Thank You for Playing. In this panel, the game developers and filmmakers come together to discuss their shared, yet separate processes of documenting their own lives and those of others, the developers’ struggles of faith, the difficult subject of hope in the face of death, and the technical challenges and unique strengths of their chosen mediums of storytelling to express such a personal, tragic, yet hopeful story.