Grieving in virtual reality isn't just healthy - it's inevitable
This article contains potential spoiler content for That Dragon, Cancer and RiME.
We’re already living in a world where we almost too accurately recreate dead celebrities to pull audiences to the latest blockbusters or big-budget advertisements. Facebook is becoming a digital graveyard - and no, that isn’t commentary on its living userbase - it’s a mausoleum, housing the preserved profiles of well over 40 million deceased users. Hong Kong has become so stretched for physical burial space, a father-and-son entrepreneurship resolved to create virtual reality graveyards (complete with virtual incense sticks) where the bereaved can visit their loved ones.
If any of this makes you a little uncomfortable, you’re not alone. It’s natural to be trepidatious when the ways in which we take care of and interact with our dead are threatened with change.
I recently stumbled across an article detailing how virtual reality was used to briefly reunite mother of four Jang Ji-sung with her deceased daughter, Nayeon. In 2016, Nayeon was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease named HLH, which led to in hyper-inflammation as a result of uncontrolled growth of the body’s white blood cells. Just one month after falling ill, she passed away in her hospital room, aged seven.
As part of South Korean TV show Meeting You, which aims to reunite the bereaved with virtual incarnations of their loved ones, South Korean start-up Vive Studios (no relation to HTC’s Vive Studios) created an avatar of Nayeon. Simlab IT details how the studio used motion capture to record an actor’s movements and facial expressions. Photogrammetry helped to create a character model from Nayeon’s younger sister. Voice recognition and basic AI were implemented which facilitated conversation where responses were based on family interviews and videos. Jang Ji-sung said her final goodbye to her daughter in a virtual recreation of a park the family frequented.
I was elated. The internet, generally speaking, was not. People feared that the mother would form a lasting relationship with the artificial recreation, and threatened depression, codependency, delusions, and addiction. Reactions varied from feeling the exercise was irresponsible and unethical, to outright repulsion. The faithful and cautious recreation of Nayeon was reduced to the ‘puppeteering of a dead child’.
When someone dies, the grief we experience is complicated and personal. It’s difficult for anyone but a therapist and the bereaved to tackle one’s own grief, but getting it right is paramount to a successful recovery. Our methods of treating grief are varied and ever-evolving, but even so, there seems to be a prevailing thought that the grieving process should remain traditional - that is, non-digital. Thing is, we’re already making this transition, both by choice and out of necessity. What we’ve seen of digital grieving so far should be no cause for concern; it should be celebrated.
A traditional Christian funeral would see an authority figure lead a congregation in sharing stories, and their grief by proxy. When the deceased is buried, the bereaved will visit this site to talk to their loved one and leave gifts. A significant part of the grieving process occurs through funerary rituals like these, which vary across cultures, but all follow a similar pattern. The importance of this ritual can be further demonstrated by an example of what happens when this pattern isn’t followed. It’s a well-known phenomenon that people who choose to scatter their loved one’s ashes without respect for a ritual - religious or not - have the potential to delay closure, endangering their grieving process. And you don’t get a do-over. Not in the real world, at least.
That Dragon, Cancer is a videogame that retells the story of Joel Green, a young boy who passed away from cancer aged four. His parents, the game’s developers, were able to memorialise their son the best way they could imagine: an emotionally-charged point-and-click eulogy, which they can choose to return to time and again. What’s more, the medium they chose to create this eulogy in means their family, friends, and innumerous others can share in Joel’s life, too. The game explores what Joel loved about life (including, importantly, pancakes), but also, what his parents loved about life with Joel.
In playing That Dragon, Cancer, you will experience an iota of the pain that comes with losing a child, and what was hardest for the parents in saying the ultimate goodbye. The support their religion offered them is also explored, the game’s narration imparting contextualised scripture and exploring religious environments cast in a complex, confusing light. That Dragon, Cancer is as much a story that invites you to comprehend Joel’s parents’ personal experience of grief as it as about Joel’s life and death. It shows us that grief is a selfish beast, fed by the recollection and sharing of painful memories.
RiME does much the same, except from the other side of the veil - the game explores the five stages of grief and the gradual acceptance of loss, but not from the perspective of the player character. As you explore RiME’s overgrown island, you encounter a figure who is always just a little too far away, never there to help when you’re stuck on a puzzle, choosing instead to duck out of sight with a solemn nod as you near. As the game progresses, what at first came across as an unkind snub eventually feels like a shared frustration; you both want to share the same space, at the same time, but this possibility has been taken from you by something invisible that’s beyond your understanding.
RiME explores the torment the bereaved feel at being the ones left behind, but once again, the game is a funerary ritual. The figure who follows your every move as the game progresses is your father, recalling your life through abstract thought and memory. As the game nears its end, he releases a ripped fragment of his son’s - the player character’s - cloak, allowing it to be taken by the wind to somewhere he will no longer be able to find it. This ending comes as a painful yet bittersweet relief to the player. That relief has only come due to the game that preceded it.
The end - whether it’s a real-world burial or scattering of ashes, no longer being able to share picnic pancakes, or the surrendering of digitally textured cloth mesh rendered through Unreal Engine - only has weight because of the ritual it accompanied, and that ritual should be made by those who need it most. Nayeon’s recreation is the same.
Grieving digitally offers us a chance to memorialise someone without worrying about the space or time we take up doing it. We no longer need to consider how many words will fit on a plaque or a gravestone, or how best to fill the five precious minutes that go into a spoken eulogy. Considerations for where someone should be buried (as we’re fast running out of space) may one day pale in comparison to the limitless digital world we can always return to that represents that person, figuratively or literally.
Our relationship with the deceased doesn’t go, it just becomes different. As That Dragon, Cancer ends, Joel’s father tells us:
‘the air is emptier without his laugh, and yet our hearts are still full. Though, with a different drink. [...] And so we sit here in this new silence’.
As such, successful grief isn’t about erasing that person from your life, but deciding how best to personally celebrate the fact that they were ever here, so you can feel, intimately, their vacancy. What is it about them you would want to experience just one more time? Imagine being able to experience that again, for even the briefest moment, until you were ready to let it go.
Nayeon died in a hospital room, within a month of falling ill. Vive Studios offered her and her mother the chance to do it again, and do it ‘right’ this time. And it’s not up to you, or anyone else, for that matter, to decide what is right for them. Jang Ji-sung was gifted the opportunity to say a meaningful goodbye in one of the family’s favourite places, and to say - and hear - what she needed and wanted to say and hear. This isn’t new, it’s something we’re doing already - why should it matter whether it happens in this reality, or a virtual one?
