To feel the thrill of lost ambition and financial ruin, just grab your Xbox control.

-By Heather Chaplin
-Photograph by Matthew Donaldson

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Photograph by Matthew Donaldson

Just a month into his one-year residency, Tom Bissell found himself staring hard at his computer screen. Having won the prestigious Rome Prize for Literature—an honor that's been bestowed on William Styron, Nadine Gordimer, and Joseph Brodsky—the 33-year-old New York-based writer was living at the American Academy, housed in a mansion on the Janiculum Hill, the highest point in Rome. He had two new book contracts and a year free of obligations. Yet here he was, browsing Amazon.co.uk. "This might not be good," he remembers thinking after he tapped the purchase button, snagging himself an Xbox 360.

Bissell had come with the best of intentions: to get a lot of writing done with few distractions. But then he and his girlfriend broke up; sales of his latest book, The Father of All Things, disappointed him; and he consigned a novel he'd been writing for five months to the trash can. The next thing he knew, he was spending entire days role-playing a dark elf in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. His productivity withered as his Oblivion mastery—not to mention his self-loathing—grew.

"It's getting to the point where it's damaging my professional ability to concentrate and to function," Bissell says. "I'm sorry, but to describe beating Oblivion as an achievement, you have to radically lower the bar. I think I'm probably the first fellow in the history of the American Academy to go out and buy an Xbox and play video games most of the time I've been here."