“...the video-game form is incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative progression. Stories are about time passing and narrative progression. Games are about challenge, which frustrates the passing of time and impedes narrative progression. The story force wants to go forward… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote.… — Tom Bissell Copy Share
“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… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
“You have agency, yes, but what of it? It is just a game. But when a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel inserted so deeply inside the game that your mind, and your feelings, become as seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of… — Tom Bissell Copy Share
“There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.” — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
“The world, finally, is no longer large, and to ignore it likely requires more effort than to simply take notice.” — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
“This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
“Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a… — Tom Bissell Copy Share
“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… — Tom Bissell Copy Share Image
