by Tom Bissell
MOLYNEUX: I would love to talk to you about this other thing we’re working on—but I can’t—because you’ll hear about this talk of “twenty-two minutes.” And you’re going to hear this soon. Why is it twenty-two minutes? It’s something that happens in twenty-two minutes. It’s not logical; it’s something in my mind. When you see the announcement, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
TCB: I won’t press you—though I really, really want to. One of the people I’ve talked to while working on this is Jonathan Blow.
MOLYNEUX: Yes.
TCB: Do you agree with him that the forward progression of story and the “friction force” of challenge create structurally unsound narrative? That games can’t tell stories in a certain sense because they’re built on a flawed edifice?
MOLYNEUX: I don’t know if I agree with that.
TCB: I don’t know if I agree, either, but it’s a very interesting argument.
MOLYNEUX: It is. You know, the thing about Braid: I loved it, I loved the atmosphere, I loved the visions, the softness of it. It kind of felt like a piece of silk you could run your hands through. It was a lovely, lovely game. But here’s the thing that didn’t work for me: It got so tough that my need and want to experience more of its world was absolutely challenged by my feeling that I wasn’t clever enough. I hit this cerebral brick wall where I kept going back to find out more about the world, feeling more and more stupid. After a while, I thought, This game is dumb. Now I think I was wrong, by the way. But this was another fight we had in Fable, which is about the death mechanic.
TCB: Fable II has an unusually forgiving death mechanic. A lot of people accused the game of being too easy.
MOLYNEUX: If you’re writing a game, why is it in so many games—even in games I’ve done—when the player dies, you ask the player to go back and reexperience what they’ve experienced before? Why do we do that? It just makes us feel stupid, and dumb, and we forget what the story is. We don’t care about the characters anymore. Some guy is telling me what I need to do again, and I want to kill him if he tells me one more time! I think that’s…well, thinking about story and narrative and gameplay, they should have a beat and rhythm that work together. You shouldn’t have gameplay being this one big thing shouting, “I’m more important than you!” They should work together, in concert. And if they do, then what I really want you to feel is fantastic about the narrative and the rhythm of the story and feel fantastic as a player. It’s what you’re feeling, not what I’m feeling as a designer. That’s what’s important: what you’re feeling.
TCB: Do you follow the indie game scene? A lot of the game writers I’ve met here seem to think that the indie game scene is the future.
MOLYNEUX: The funny thing is, we’ve been here as an industry before. Three years ago, these guys didn’t exist. They weren’t here. The entry level into the industry was so enormously high. If you asked me how to get into the game industry three years ago, I would have said, “Go to university, get a top degree, then go to work as a junior coder or designer and maybe in seven years’ time you’ll be a lead designer on a game.” Now I can say to you, “Get a friend, smoke lots of dope, go in a room, come out when you’ve got a really good idea, and release it on Xbox Live Arcade.” And you know what? That’s where I was twenty years ago. I was one of those guys twenty years ago. I was doing a game called Populous. I was in a room. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know, really, anything about game design, or much of anything about programming, and I sort of came up with this concept. So yes, some of those people are going to be the future, but I don’t think you can look even at Braid and think, This is the future of games. It’s just one aspect of it.
TCB: I went to the Hideo Kojima lecture this morning, and he showed slides from the first Metal Gear game and then the most recent, and seeing those images in such close proximity made me realize, “My god—we’ve gone from petroglyphic rock art to the Sistine Chapel in twenty years!”
MOLYNEUX: I’m going to sell this hard, because I love what I do and I love this industry. Here’s what’s even more amazing: If I were to draw on the wall what a computer-game character was just twenty years ago it would be made up of sixteen-by-sixteen dots, and that’s it. We’ve gone from that to daring to suggest we can represent the human face. And pretty much everything we’ve done, we’ve invented. There wasn’t this technology pool that we pulled it out of. Ten, fifteen years ago, you couldn’t walk into a bookshop and learn how to do it. There weren’t any books on this stuff. They did not exist. Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? No. We had to invent architecture first. We had to quarry the stones. We had to invent the paint. That really is amazing. Think of word processors and spreadsheets and operating systems—they’re all kind of the same as they were fifteen years ago. There is not another form of technology on this planet that has kept up with games. The game industry marches on in the way it does because it has this dream that, one day, it’s going to be real. We’re going to have real life. We’re going to have real characters. We’re going to have real drama. We’re going to change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before.
* And this is to say nothing of some wonderful games I’ve played since inserting this note etc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first and biggest thanks to Cliff Bleszinski, Dave Nash, Lee Perry, Rod Fergusson, Chris Perna, Alan Willard, Ray Davis, and Tim Sweeney from Epic; Drew Karpyshyn and Heather Rabatich from BioWare; Clint Hocking and Cedric Orvoine from Ubisoft Montreal; John Hight from Sony Computer Entertainment; Sir Peter Molyneux from Lionhead; Joshua Ortega; and Jonathan Blow. Thank you to Debbie Chen and Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, for speaking with me. Thank you, too, to the writers Chris Dahlen, Michael Abbott, Leigh Alexander, Geoff Keighley, Scott Jones, Rob Auten, Matthew S. Burns, Jamin Brophy-Warren, and Harry “the Media Assassin” Allen (who probably does not know that it was our conversation, years ago, at a Rockstar party, that first got me thinking about writing this book), for your work and the inspiration it frequently provided. A special thank-you to Heather Chaplin, who opened the door.
Thank you to Leo Carey and David Remnick at The New Yorker for allowing men with chainsaws to provide me entry into its pages. Thank you, as always, to Heather Schroder, Dan Frank, and Andrew Miller. Thank you to Oliver Broudy, for an early and important nudge, and Ross Simonini, for another. Thank you to Adrienne Miller, who read versions of these chapters many times. Thank you to Gary Sernovitz, the Skeptic. Thank you to Juliet Litman, for her excellent transcribing work. An especially huge and distended thank-you to Mark Van Lommel, whose enthusiasm, belief, and magic Rolodex in many ways allowed this book to be written.
To David Amsden (the finest sniper on Sera), Nathalie Chicha (my guitar hero), Jeff Alexander (Prophecy!), Dan Josefson (“My father? The president?”), Yrjó Ojasaar (who will never play as the Russians in Civilization Revolution), Jei Virunurm (the Force is strong with this one), Matthew McGough (“Oh, god! Help me!”), Kerle Kiik (Hendrix lives!), Jen Wang (Freebird), Joe Cameron (thanks for that neat pistol-whip trick, and a few others), Marc Johnson (“Pills here!”), Jason Coley (Master Chief), Gideon Lewis-Kraus (The Power of the Atom!), Paolo Bernagozzi (il mio video fratello), Hendrik Dey (Gooooooaaaaaaal!), Pierre-Yves Savard (zombicidal maniac), Nick Laird (shadow hide you), Arman Schwartz (Lego enthusiast), Juan Martinez ([undead groan]), and Owen King (Xbox 360 melter): You have been my most frequent video-game partners and opponents over the last few years; thank you for playing with me. To Maile Chapman, thank you for listening to the gestation of so many of these ideas, for being the first person to whom I showed BioShock, and for everything else. Thank you, finally, to Trisha Miller, who is, and ever will be, my extra life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Bissell (Xbox Live gamertag: T C Bissell; PlayStation Network gamertag: TCBissell) was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University, he briefly served in t
he Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, and then worked for several years as a book editor in New York City. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and McSweeney’s. His first book, Chasing the Sea, was selected by Condé Nast Traveler in 2007 as one of the eighty-six best travel books of all time. His second book, God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories, won the Rome Prize. His third book, The Father of All Things, was selected as a best book of the year by Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and by Details magazine in 2009 as the eighth-greatest Generation X book of all time. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches fiction writing at Portland State University. His next book, Bones That Shine Like Fire, a travel narrative about his visits to the tombs of the Twelve Apostles, will be published in 2012.
Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work originally appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Kill Screen.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bissell, Tom.
Extra lives : why video games matter / Tom Bissell
p. cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-37928-3
1. Video games—History. 2. Video Games—Social aspects
I. Title
GV1469.3.B55 2010
794.8—dc22 2009039602
www.pantheonbooks.com
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