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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.

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

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

From Tom Bissell

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.

From Tom Bissell

Tom Bissell

Notable Quotes

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