When Ryan and Amy Green found out their son Joel had a brain tumor they were devastated. But they decided to take an optimistic and proactive approach—to live everyday as if Joel was not sick. However it wasn’t quite as simple as simply “thinking positive.” A parent dealing with a terminally ill child cannot simply will away their grief, and so this is what makes this story inspiring. The Greens took their grief and focused it into a creative project, creating a document of Joel’s short time in this world.

Joel was stable until age five which freed up his parents from focusing on cancer treatments, allowing them instead to focus on their project: a video game. As a video game designer, Ryan already had in place all the technical know-how, technology, and manpower necessary to create a game, and as soon as this film starts, we see a scene from the game he created: That Dragon, Cancer.

Filmmakers David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, remain impartial to the video game project. We have no idea if this is a good idea, or a horrible one since they give opinions from both sides. It is in one scene where Ryan takes his game to a video game trade show and sets it up amongst the many shooter games where we start to get honest reactions from people playing the game. People are moved to tears, hugging Ryan and praising him for his courage. While it is possible the negative reviews may have been edited out, there is something honest about the way people react, as if people could not help but be moved. Perhaps the most important statement made in the film happens here: 95% of the games in the world are made for entertainment alone: combat, fantasy, racing, but why can't gamesbe used for more than this? Maybe video games could be used as a platform for many for types of dialogues, for example, incurable diseases. Seeing this idea in the context of an arena full of combat games, the potential for video games, at least momentarily, seems enormous.