Gears of War: Judgment, and the Writing of Its Narrative" In 2010 Tom Bissell — author of seven books, contributor to publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, darling of book reviewers who compare him to writers like Wells Tower and John Jeremiah Sullivan — announced that he was going to “go game,” in the way that prominent writers “go Hollywood,” in search of bigger paychecks and the challenges of a new form. The occasion, at the McNally Jackson bookstore in the NoLIta section of Manhattan, was a reading of “Extra Lives,” Mr. Bissell’s delightfully ambivalent defense of video games. In that book he declared that games were “the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life,” and yet he also attacked the industry for “an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization.”