Tom Bissell Quotes & Sayings

[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. — Tom Bissell

The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock's unforgettable villain. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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

Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment. — Tom Bissell

The video-game form is incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative progression. Stories are about time passing and narrative progression. Games are about challenge, which frustrates the passing of time and impedes narrative progression. The story force wants to go forward and the "friction force" of challenge tries to hold story back. This is the conflict at the heart of the narrative game, one that game designers have thus far imperfectly addressed by making story the reward of a successfully met challenge. — Tom Bissell

Sitting there, I remembered two things about going to mass with my father: he never took Communion because of his and my mother's divorce, and he always tapped his heart three times, with solemn insistence, after the recitation of the Apostles' Creed. I asked him about his ritual once. His eyes filled with such alarm that I instantly knew his heart tapping had something to do with a loss or devastation: his parents' early death, his divorce, his wounding in Vietnam. There was no reason for me to invade that space. Maybe that was the best simple explanation for religion: it filled our spaces. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

I don't know how video game narrative works. — Tom Bissell

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

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

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. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

There's a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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

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

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

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

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. — Tom Bissell

I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

You have agency, yes, but what of it? It is just a game. But when a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel inserted so deeply inside the game that your mind, and your feelings, become as seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

The impulse to explain is the Achilles' heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection. — Tom Bissell

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game. — Tom Bissell

More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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

Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game. — Tom Bissell

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

Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent. This was never the most promising thematic carbon to trace, and yet shooters keep doing so with as little self-questioning as a medieval monk copying out scripture. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games. — Tom Bissell

The world, finally, is no longer large, and to ignore it likely requires more effort than to simply take notice. — Tom Bissell

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

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts. — Tom Bissell

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

Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art. — Tom Bissell

And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded watseland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealth with. Trust Daddy on this one. — Tom Bissell

All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. — Tom Bissell

I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me. — Tom Bissell

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. — Tom Bissell

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

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. — Tom Bissell

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers. — Tom Bissell

Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self. — Tom Bissell