Top 18 Tom Bissell Quotes

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.

The average action game doesn’t much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.

The kinds of games I’m most interested in are narrative games.

I don’t know how video game narrative works.

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.

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.

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.

Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.

There’s a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock’s unforgettable villain.

All video games are games, obviously. They’re designed. They’re digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.

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.

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.

Games tell stories best when they’re elliptical and ambiguous and there’s a sense of roaming and freedom.