BROOKE GLADSTONE: By his own account, Tom Bissell has spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours shooting people, stealing cars, destabilizing African countries, shooting people, massacring zombies, navigating post-apocalyptic worlds and shooting people. To be fair, some of them were trying to kill him, but still. Video games are nothing if not games, but for Bissell in just the last four years they have become a wildly addictive, almost compulsive habit consuming more and more of his waking life. It's not that he was deliberately avoiding his life, Bissell's days have been spent in varied and prolific enterprise, writing novels, short stories, essays, criticism and dispatches as an embedded reporter in Iraq. But nothing in recent years has matched the thrill of looking through the eyes of a character in first-person games like Grand Theft Auto or Far Cry 2 and doing whatever the game required. Bissell's account of his video game years is called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Tom, welcome to the show.

TOM BISSELL: It's wonderful to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A lot of the critique of video games in general comes down to violence, especially first-person shooters which are —

TOM BISSELL: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: — spectacularly violent. How do you answer the violence critique?

TOM BISSELL: A lot of the games that people decry, you know what is happening to our kids, they're not really made for kids. But the first thing is that most games are not violent. I tend to like violent games, the same reason that I've worked as a war correspondent, the same reason I wrote a book about a war. I'm interested in violence. That said, there are some games that have interesting stuff to say about violence and some games that just treat it mindlessly. And, you know both can be fun. But the ones that really affect me are the ones that actually try to address the subject. There's a game called Far Cry 2 that takes place in a contemporary African civil war. It's extremely beautiful.

[AMBIENT SOUNDS/DRUMMING, ANIMALS] And yet, it is just the most unrelentingly savage game I think I've ever played.

[GUNFIRE] Most games that are violent give you the gun, push you in the direction of the bad guys and say hey, go kill all those guys, they're bad. You'll be rewarded. Good job. Far Cry 2 does something really confounding. Going through the game, quote, "getting better at killing," the game kind of introduces slowly that you're actually not helping things, that, in fact, you're kind of the problem. Everything you're doing is just making this conflict worse. So by the end of the game you're just a wreck. You're progressing through the game because that's what the game's asked you to do, but it's also throwing all of this stuff back at you that's actually shaming you a little bit for being participant in this virtual slaughter. And I love that about it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does it give you the option of say, joining a U.N. peacekeeper force —

TOM BISSELL: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: — or a diplomatic delegation?

TOM BISSELL: [LAUGHS] It absolutely does not! [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

TOM BISSELL: No. No, it doesn't. Then Grand Theft Auto IV, they created this really tormented kind of awful character named Niko.

[CLIP/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]:

NIKO: During the war, did some bad things. Bad things happened to us.

[NOISE IN BACKGROUND] Maybe that is no excuse. But I need money. This pays, and I'm good at it.

[GUNFIRE]

TOM BISSELL: Niko is trying to escape his nature, and that's what the game is really about. Niko is fundamentally a bad guy. But he has a decent sense of right and wrong, and you sense that he kind of wants to do the right thing. Now, the problem is that the game actually asks him to do bad things throughout the entire game [LAUGHS] and he does them with varying levels of enthusiasm. To me the really riveting part of the game was rooting for him and trying to play it in a way that honored my conception of him which was as a legitimately tormented person.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're animating Niko.

TOM BISSELL: You're both observing him and you're also portraying him, which is this really weird thing that video games do.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And when critics criticize video games —notably Roger Ebert, for instance, said that video games can never be art — you noted that he came to this conclusion after watching people play a game which you said is akin to watching a movie with the picture turned off.

TOM BISSELL: Yeah, it's exactly what it's like. You know this is a real problem with video games. Learning how to play them with any level of skill or enjoyment requires you to learn this foreign language, which is the language of the controller, the language of game play, the kind of sense of where useful information is gonna be found on the screen or in the interface systems. And so, there's no doubt that games have several very large conceptual boulders blocking people who might be inclined to think highly of the form's potential and yet can't get there because of this weird interface system that games have evolved to have.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You point to a kind of game avant garde that's trying to challenge almost everything about how games are designed and written. But games are really big business now, rival to the movie industry. Is there a financial incentive to take risk? Do enough people want the smart emotionally and morally substantive games that you say you want?

TOM BISSELL: That remains to be seen. I don't think so.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

TOM BISSELL: The biggest problem with games is the fact that they are such big business, and it's one of the most risk-averse industries in the world. I mean, they make Hollywood look like avant garde poetry publishers. There are enough people, I think, who are trying to push the envelope creatively. But the problem is every time a game does come along and tries to push the envelope creatively, oftentimes the people who will jump on it hardest will be gamers, which reinforces the company's sense that gamers don't want new innovative stuff. And then we go back to year zero. And then we're all in this very unhappy place where every game that comes out either has an elf on the cover or an M16, where you swing hula hoops around your head and throw things at hippos, and, and everything just feels kind of ghettoized, kind of boring, to tell you the truth.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why did you write your book?

TOM BISSELL: On one hand, it's an attempt to make a case for video games' artistic legitimacy. On the other hand, it's an attempt to explain to people who are convinced by video games' artistic legitimacy why their case isn't as good as they think it is.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

TOM BISSELL: So I wrote the book because I was a literary writer; I wrote short stories, I wrote literary journalism., and I played, you know video games lightheartedly and, and didn't really expect much more out of them than fun. I think about 2006, 2007 I started to notice that video game storytelling was actually getting really kind of good, which isn't to say most video game storytelling was good or is good. In fact, most of it is quite clumsy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You can't get past how bad the writing continues to be, the — the dialogue, sometimes the plots and the, and the character development. Why are those parts of the games so slow to develop?

TOM BISSELL: Well, it's a far more complicated question than it seems. At first blush it's just that the people that grew up designing video games just didn't have a lot of formal dramatic training. Because of the culture that ignored the importance of really addressing questions of dramatic motivation, the — the medium sort of is stuck with a kind of clumsiness at the core of it. And there are things inherent to the video game medium that create this really weird push and pull between the creator and the audience, and they kind of wrestle for meaning, in moments. And so, the author figure is saying, this is important, do this, and the gamer's saying, I don't want to do that. The stories can't ever really quite gel or be coherent in the way that we've come to understand storytelling.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Because no one is entirely in control?

TOM BISSELL: Exactly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's very hard to have a strong narrative structure when the experience is created both by the designers of the game and the gamer. You make a point of saying, you know that what books allow you to do is to inhabit the consciousness of another person and experience a kind of visceral empathy with a stranger. Is that getting better in today's game?

TOM BISSELL: Well, no. And I, I don't think it really can. I really think if you work in a medium your point is to bring out what the medium does best. As a fiction writer, what I seek to achieve is that sense that you, the reader, has entered into another human being who is suddenly a living person, and you are getting a guided tour of their mind. And that is the thing that I love about fiction, and that's the thing that only fiction can give you. And so, all of the juice of video game storytelling comes from those moments in which — for instance, at the end of Grand Theft Auto Niko has this run-in with someone who betrayed him, and Niko's been looking for him the whole game - it's the moment of recognition and this man is like a pathetic drug-addicted wretch. And Niko has the gun to his head and suddenly the game gives control back to you, and you have to decide what to do with this guy. Do you walk away or do you kill him? Your impulse is to show him mercy because you're a human being but, at the same time, you can't forget what Niko has sort of suffered because of this guy. That is the kind of storytelling that I love about games. It actually gives you this unbelievably scary and weird and often very troubling kind of agency. And fiction can't do that, movies can't do that. That's the kind of things that I love about games, is those moments of just jaw-dropping scary freedom.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about compulsivity. First of all, you describe an unbelievable amount of productivity. You are able to write so much, so quickly. And yet, you wrote, "I woke up this morning at 8 a.m. fully intending to write this chapter. Instead, I played Left for Dead until 5 p.m.

[TOM LAUGHS] The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent cat naps. It is now 10 p.m. and I've only started to work. I know how I will spend the late frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night and the night before that, walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless strangely peaceful panic, not knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who or what I once was."

TOM BISSELL: You know, I'm totally that games have taken some toll on my ability to concentrate, my ability to write certain kinds of things. I mean, six years ago I wrote a 50-page essay on Solschenizyn. The idea of doing that right now is inconceivable to me. Right now I'm very committed to bringing the emotional resonance I want from game experiences into games, and I'm working in games a little bit right now, and I'm determined to try to do this. I realize that it might not work. I'm not going to be able to figure out how to tell a new story in literary fiction. That medium's formal problems have been solved long before I was, you know a mere babe. This is a medium that is actually open to more directional influence from smart people working within it than maybe any other popular medium around right now. And, you know if I'm gonna go there and get crushed for the sake of, you know, increased game storytelling sophistication, I willingly place myself under the cruel mistress' boot heel.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom, thank you so much.

TOM BISSELL: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Bissell is a fiction writer, essayist and critic. His new book is Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]





BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips and Nazanin Rafsanjani, with more help from Alex Goldman, Michael Chaplin and Bret Jaspers and edited – by Brooke. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and engineering help from Robert Graniss.





BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find transcripts at Onthemedia.org. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter or email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.





BOB GARFIELD: And I'm the one who isn’t Brooke Gladstone.







[MUSIC]





BROOKE GLADSTONE: He always says something like that. Then we just wait a while and he’ll go, oh wait, I have an idea. Why don’t I try it like this.





BOB GARFIELD: I have an idea. Yeah, let – let me take a different approach. Let me try it this way: And I’m Bob Garfield. [FUNDING CREDITS]