Tom Bissell Quotes

Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.

Final Fantasy VII awoke American gaming to the possibilities of narrative dynamism and the importance of relatively developed characters - no small inspiration to take from a series whose beautifully androgynous male characters often appear to be some kind of heterosexual stress test.

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. *This* makes them do *that* ... But the war does not make sense. War senselessly wounds everyone right down the line. A body bag fits more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six - and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war has done ... War when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable. It is not an occasion for heroism. It is an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guarantees its inevitable reappearance.

The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.

I'm an Old Media guy. I don't have a website; I don't Twitter. I love magazines, yet I love video games. It's a strange disconnect.

Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line's edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.

Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades - and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong.

Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.

Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate.

The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

To create anything - whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom - is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic - which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

I have an immensely understanding partner who does something creative herself, and we both need a lot of time alone. I structure my life around getting my work done, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. That's the only way I've been able to do it.

Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.

All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life
the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes
ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.

I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.

Had Dr. Seuss been a slightly insane pornographer, he might have written a book like this.--reviewing Nicholson Baker's House of Holes

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.

The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.

When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad.

For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

To create anything ... is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.