grief

Fragments of Him finds the everyday poetry of grief

It is very, very hard to talk about death and grief without falling into platitudes. But we have the elegy to save us from the cliché—that form of poem or writing that seeks to capture the abyssal depths of the writer’s despair over the absence of the departed and impart some singular meaning to tha

A videogame about the impossibility of grieving for Pol Pot

“Much of the experience of the site takes place in one’s head,” says the itch.io page for Cho-am, a new game from Aaron Oldenburg. The site described is the place where Pol Pot—the brutal dictator behind the Cambodian genocide in the late 70s—was cremated. In “real life” Cambodia, this site is near

The game of grief

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. That Dragon, Cancer (PC, Mac) NUMINOUS GAMES Many people pretend to know how you should grieve. Endless self-help books and articles give instructions on what’s “normal” and “healthy” and “exp

The impossibility of sadness in That Dragon, Cancer

Art has always been useful for drawing our attention to the controversially sad. Take something like Zoe Quinn’s text adventure Depression Quest; depression is, by its nature, a miserable affliction, but it is also a diagnostic category burdened by stigma, shame, and skepticism. Some people insist t