Tom Bissell
Tom Bissell
Tom Bissellis an American journalist, critic, and fiction writer, originally from Escanaba, Michigan, and currently based in Los Angeles, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
feels game love stuff
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.
blood books both feels interested lives people time waste watch
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.
bored course create designed designers endure games inside intensely obstacle people pile player players work worried
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.
cannot derives guess learned novelist novels terms thinks
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.
cultural dreams epoch european native north ongoing particular
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.
anyone certain developed dread meticulous system taken taught
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.
action average game games traffic
The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.
love video
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.
happens writer
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.
I don't know how video game narrative works.
art best deserve seen sports
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.
audience experience games type vicarious video
All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.
art enchanting genuinely glorified thomas
Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.
ambiguous best freedom roaming stories
Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.