Tom Bissell Quotes

#1. Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

Karina Longworth

#2. 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

#3. Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment.

Tom Bissell

#4. 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

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

Tom Bissell

#6. There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.

Tom Bissell

#7. 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

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell

#32. Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.

Tom Bissell

#33. 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

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

Tom Bissell

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock's unforgettable villain.

Tom Bissell

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. I don't know how video game narrative works.

Tom Bissell

#42. 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

#43. I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games.

Tom Bissell

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

Tom Bissell