Tom Bissell

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I don't know how video game narrative works.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”