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
The average action game doesn’t much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Games tell stories best when they’re elliptical and ambiguous and there’s a sense of roaming and freedom. – 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
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
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
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
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
Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling. – 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
There’s a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey. – Tom Bissell
The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock’s unforgettable villain. – 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
