In case you couldn’t tell from the headline, this is going to be a fairly personal article. At more than one point while writing this piece, I stopped and thought ‘hmm, do I really want to bare my soul like this to thousands of people on the internet?’
Then I thought ‘sure, why not?’ We need to talk more about cancer as a society; it’s a looming specter that is It is almost certain that you, or someone you know, will be affected. (Opens in a new tab At some point in your lifetime. According to the NHS, 1 in 2 people in the UK will develop cancer. The CDC estimates that almost 2 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer by 2021.
I’ll stop doomsaying now. The raw data is frightening, but it’s important to remember that many of these are eminently treatable, whether it’s an early-stage cancer that can be sent packing with a quick blast of radiotherapy or that suspicious mole that your uncle had lasered off his back.
My cancer was not one among these. In late 2019, I complained about a lump in the neck and was diagnosed with lipoma. This is a benign fatty tissue. Unfortunately, my diagnosis process was stopped when COVID lockdowns took place in 2020. It wasn’t until November that year that I received the news: a rare form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which had metastasized throughout my body. Widespread. Stage 4.
This is how to deal with it
In 2020, I lost over six stone (about 40kg), as my body succumbed to cancer and my energy levels plummeted. The diagnosis was in a way a relief. I had been suffering from undiagnosed aches and pains and my paranoia about what was going on was washed away with a wave of terrible confirmation.
I was a healthy, fit young woman who was able to take the hardest chemo that my local oncology unit could give me. My cancer was treatable – and we’d caught it just in the nick of time. I won’t lie; the horrible weight of the task ahead of me reduced me to tears more than once. Because I spent almost an entire hour in tears while calling my relatives and talking on the phone after my diagnosis, I was issued a parking violation.
I returned to my home and told my partner. We made more phone calls. After the plans were made, we had cried, appointments had been booked and I did what every rational person would do: I sat at my computer. Gaming PCI was playing some Hades.
Gaming can be a crutch – but that isn’t always bad
Let me just say that games played a significant role in my journey with cancer. They kept me sane through the worst times, but the real lifesavers were the people who helped me get through it. My wonderful parents, my incredible fiancé, and the leagues of hardworking, compassionate healthcare staff who attended to my treatment are the real heroes of this story. They are all deserving of more than I could give.
This is not the case. An article on games, so let’s talk about that. I had already been using games to dull the tedium of COVID quarantine, as I’m sure millions if not billions of people did. My gaming computer was upgraded and I bought a Nintendo Switch to match my partner’s Nintendo Switch so that we could both play Animal Crossing New Horizons. We spent many happy hours tucked up in bed playing games together, whiling away the time we couldn’t spend outside.
I took a break from work, as I was writing for Maximum PC magazine at the time. I spent much of my time gaming to distract me. My eyes were almost always fixed on a screen, whether it was at home on my computer, on my couch or on my Switch while I went to chemotherapy. Games offered me a level of distraction that TV, movies, or music could not. It was immersion that demands your full attention.
Outside of my situation, this would’ve been cause for concern. In the context of the situation, however, it was considered a win. Better to get out of bed and play Warframe than stay under the duvet. Digital Extremes, who sent me a virtual care package with in-game goodies after I received my diagnosis, deserves special praise. You guys rock.
If at first you don’t succeed…
It took me awhile, but around the second round of chemotherapy treatment, I discovered that I was obsessed by a particular genre of video games, called roguelikes.
If you’re not already familiar with them, roguelikes are games that hark back to the core mechanics of the 1980 ASCII dungeon-crawler Rogue, from which they take their name. Rogue was the first game to feature procedurally-generated dungeons, meaning that every playthrough would be different; where once you might find a useful item, on a second attempt you could run across a powerful enemy. You die and you can start over with your knowledge.
Roguelikes are gaining popularity with songs such as Hades and Returnal topping the sales charts. They also have an enduring appeal due to their unending appeal. I’m not going to differentiate between rogueLikes Rogue and the other.Lites here because I find the divide trivial; some claim roguelites are less pure since they allow items, upgrades, or cumulative progress to carry over between playthroughs, but I’ve always thought of it as more of an evolution of the genre.
Throughout my treatment for cancer, I played a lot roguelikes (or even roguelites). Hades, Enter the Gungeon and Darkest Dungeon were just a few of the many roguelikes I played during my cancer treatment. These games are now available on iOS as well as Android, so I can take my repetitive obsession from the couch to wherever I am going.
I’m going to take a brief aside here to say that if you’re a roguelike fan and there are any games on that list that you haven’t played: go play them! They’re all great! Griftlands and Hades are two of the most prominent features of this genre.
…die, die again
Every run, every loop should feel like progress. This is the secret sauce to any good roguelike. Hades, perhaps the most ardent adherent to this principle, has a lot of character dialogue that changes every time Zagreus, the charming protagonist, dies and rewakens in the house the Olympian. All of the games that I have listed have an upgrade system. This allows you to grow in strength and eventually eliminates the foes who caused you so much trouble at first.
That feeling of progress doesn’t have to come in the form of tangible power boosts, either. Slay the Spire’s tight card-based combat inInspirationd (in-spireAlthough there are many card-battlers that play the same game, few of them can really emulate the great aspect of the game: the learning aspect. Slay The Spire is full of complex interactions and card effects that overlap. It is difficult to master these mechanics and get to the top. You must be willing to fail and experiment.
These games reminded me of my own life experiences. I was faced with a Spire of my own to Slay, except this Spire was my own body, and much like that game’s nameless heroes, I had to embark on a difficult quest to excise the evil lurking within. I was unsure of what to do and where to start. I also read the StS wiki, trying to figure out why my deck strategy failed.
The art of repetition
Going to the hospital and enduring one seven-hour session of chemotherapy and antibody treatment didn’t cure me. But it did get me a little bit closer to being cured; every time I would come home and feel like an asbestos coatrack for days, but by the time the next session came around, I’d be ready for more.
I discovered more about my treatment and the science behind my treatment. I also learned more about the lives and work of the nurses who gave me ruby-red drugs via my arms. That helped slowly. I wasn’t just fighting my lymphoma; I was understanding it. Like Zagreus attempting endlessly to escape his godly father’s domain, I was getting closer and closer to victory, but also growing closer to the people I cared about. They say that the strongest bonds are formed in fire.
Repeating is the key to peace. The structureless weeks and days of my cancer-imposed quarantine were transformed into something new by games. I sat in an empty waiting room and emptied my phone’s battery playing games while I awaited surgery to remove that golf-ball-sized tumor from my neck. Even though I was in a hospital room for more than a month, I still took my medication. ultrabook I immersed myself in Heat Signature’s fast-paced action until my arms became too weak to reach for the keyboard.
And I won the final.
What can we do to stop roguelikes from entering our homes?
To be completely clear, Heat Signature was not my winning game. I got stuck on one the challenge missions, and have not been back to the game in over a year since being discharged from the hospital. I did win when it came to the lymphoma, though; as of mid-2022, I’m officially cancer-free and my body has largely recovered from my time confined to a hospital bed. I came very close to losing it during my last stint on the transplant unit. I suffered from intracranial bleeding and severe infection, and was admitted to the ICU. I am grateful for the combination of exhaustion as well as morphine.
I survived, and although my battle with cancer left me mentally and physically scarred, I am now full of energy and enthusiasm for life. Except for the occasional dip into, I have never been sick. My phone is capable of spire-slaying, I feel I’ve moved on from roguelikes; I no longer crave the one-more-run grind, the steady march towards progress one death at a time.
My partner and I have been playing Stardew Valley on our Switches with a friend, now that I’m permitted to have house guests. On my PC, I’ve been delving into the narrative excellence of the remastered Mass Effect trilogy and A Plague Tale: Requiem, and on my phone I’ve been experiencing some slow-burn goodness with Tender: Creature Comforts and Bird Alone.
I’m not saying I’ll never play roguelikes again. My love for the genre is undiminished; when executed well, it’s the perfect cocktail of difficulty and replayability, and the use of procedural generation means that indie developers can create hugely varied worlds to fight through without needing the vast resources of a triple-A publisher. If I find my Spire, I’m sure that those games and many others will be there to welcome me back.
