Tom Bissell Games Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad.

Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.