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
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.
aesthetic associated concerns finding formal mostly shocked video
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.
both creative immensely life partner structure time understanding work
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.
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.
front perform
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.
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.
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.
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.