Tom Bissell

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe,…

— Tom Bissell

“Final Fantasy VII awoke American gaming to the possibilities of narrative dynamism and the importance of relatively developed characters—no small inspiration to…

— Tom Bissell

“You have agency, yes, but what of it? It is just a game. But when a game does this well, you lose…

— Tom Bissell

“There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.”

— Tom Bissell

“The world, finally, is no longer large, and to ignore it likely requires more effort than to simply take notice.”

— Tom Bissell

“This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot…

— Tom Bissell

We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering…

— Tom Bissell

To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

— Tom Bissell

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

“Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather…

— Tom Bissell

“Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these…

— Tom Bissell

“And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded watseland,…

— Tom Bissell

Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.

— Tom Bissell

“The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better…

— Tom Bissell

Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment.

— Tom Bissell

“What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing - solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing - is simultaneously the…

— Tom Bissell

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

— Tom Bissell

“Had Dr. Seuss been a slightly insane pornographer, he might have written a book like this.--reviewing Nicholson Baker's House of Holes”

— Tom Bissell

“More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting…

— Tom Bissell

“I have had moderately meaningful relationships in which I invested less time than what I have spent on some BioWare games.”

— Tom Bissell

“In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me,…

— Tom Bissell

“...the video-game form is incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative progression. Stories are about time passing and narrative progression. Games are about…

— Tom Bissell

“When a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel…

— Tom Bissell

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

— Tom Bissell

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

— Tom Bissell