Tom Bissell > Quotes

“A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.”
― Tom Bissell

“Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.”
― Tom Bissell

“We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.”
― Tom Bissell

“Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom. ”
― Tom Bissell

“Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment. ”
― Tom Bissell

“In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. *This* makes them do *that*… But the war does not make sense. War senselessly wounds everyone right down the line. A body bag fits more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six—and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war has done… War when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable. It is not an occasion for heroism. It is an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guarantees its inevitable reappearance.”
― Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam

“Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.”
― Tom Bissell

“More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad.”
― 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, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealth with. Trust Daddy on this one.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.”
― Tom Bissell

“Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“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 a series whose beautifully androgynous male characters often appear to be some kind of heterosexual stress test.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“...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 and the "friction force" of challenge tries to hold story back. This is the conflict at the heart of the narrative game, one that game designers have thus far imperfectly addressed by making story the reward of a successfully met challenge.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“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 lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life--the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes--ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.”
― 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, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“The world, finally, is no longer large, and to ignore it likely requires more effort than to simply take notice.”
― 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, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“Of that time, there is still much we do not know.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades—and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“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

“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 digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line's edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent. This was never the most promising thematic carbon to trace, and yet shooters keep doing so with as little self-questioning as a medieval monk copying out scripture.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.”
― Tom Bissell

“There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“It wasn’t often that you got to see a man whose dreams were literally about to come true, but then the lights went down, and I couldn’t see him anymore.”
― Tom Bissell, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

“A disarmingly accurate generalization about assholes: They know a lot, however brittle their knowledge becomes under intimacy's whitest, hottest lights.”
― Tom Bissell, God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories

“I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man's friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.

Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them do so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence, and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve