I don't know how video game narrative works. Tom Bissell More Quotes by Tom Bissell More Quotes From Tom Bissell 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. Tom Bissell game you you-can-do-it love I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart. Tom Bissell city dreams place day 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. Tom Bissell small creative writing long 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. Tom Bissell cycle dreams book america 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. Tom Bissell game me aesthetic character 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. Tom Bissell camera beginning know editing Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling. Tom Bissell some game like art 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. Tom Bissell game you work people 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. Tom Bissell stand game know me The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games. Tom Bissell interested most narrative games 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. Tom Bissell game space home sometimes All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. Tom Bissell video-games rules digital experience 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. Tom Bissell best deserve world art There's a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey. Tom Bissell game you want world 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. Tom Bissell video-games strange media love
