Extra Lives Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful?”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“PLUMBER’S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE! is a story, but it is a rudimentary fairytale story without any of the proper fairytale’s evocative nuances and dreads.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience. It”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

“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 suddenly unknowably alive as you are.”
― Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter