Authors: Tom Bissell
Extra Lives (25 page)
*
And this is to say nothing of some wonderful games I’ve played since inserting this note etc.
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.
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 the 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
v3.0