Tom Bissell
Tom Bissell
Tom Bissellis an American journalist, critic, and fiction writer, originally from Escanaba, Michigan, and currently based in Los Angeles, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
games
The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.
action average game games traffic
The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.
love video
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.
happens writer
I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.
I don't know how video game narrative works.
art best deserve seen sports
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.
ambiguous best freedom roaming stories
Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.
audience experience games type vicarious video
All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.
art enchanting genuinely glorified thomas
Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.
blood books both feels interested lives people time waste watch
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.
hands opinion reader
Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
believe book editing
[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.
believe magic stories
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. I tried to see.
artist facts addresses
An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.