It’s so obvious! It’s a natural. Dante’s Inferno is now a video game!
Thanks to Jonathan Knight, executive producer at the gaming company Electronic Arts you can travel through a series of levels, deeper into the center of the earth.
“Each circle has a theme and its own unique set of monsters and challenges,” Knight points out as he explains why it’s not just the episodic architecture of sin that makes the poem a good fit for a video game: a damsel is the quintessential gamer’s goal.
In the original, Beatrice saves Dante. Of course that wouldn’t work in the updated version. In today’s digitized world, Dante, a “heavily armored crusader, giant scythe gripped in one hand, six-pack abs rippling,” has to save her.
While preparing to market the game, Electronic Arts conducted a survey to assess what people knew about the classic poem. While a lot of people – 83 percent – said they had heard of it, fewer than 20 percent could remember what it was actually about. Because of this, some fear that the action video game may become all many people know of Dante’s poem. And such fears are not unfounded: the image of the poet as a battle-scarred crusader is now the top search result for Dante on Google, Youtube and even Amazon Books. For anyone casually searching out the Inferno, the digital Dante has displaced the original.
The video game begins, as the poem does, with Dante entering Hell. At the midpoint on the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost. “It’s a metaphor for mid-life crises, essentially,” says lead game designer Desilets. “We took those ideas and did the video game version, casting Dante as a warrior who has made a lot of bad choices.”
In the original poem, the narrative is peppered with some of Dante’s contemporaries. Farinata, the father-in-law of Dante’s best friend, denied the existence of life after death, and so appears in the sixth circle, Heresy. Brunetto Latini, a fellow poet, appears in the seventh circle, Violence, for committing sodomy. By including his own peers, Dante wanted to make readers think deeply about the pervasive nature of sin.
In the video-game version, it’s through action that players get to ponder their moral choices. “We created a game mechanic around the various damned souls,” explains senior producer Justin Lambros. “The player is given a chance to absolve or punish them, and this action has a direct impact on how you upgrade your character.” You can save a sinner, in other words, or simply hack him to bits, and your moral choice has an impact on the way you progress through the game.
Dante struggled with the idea that the classic poets he admired so much were technically heretics and thus condemned to hell. Gamers are exposed to this conflict, courtesy of the Roman poet Virgil, who acts as guide, just as he did in the poem. Speaking lines from the original text, he explains why unbaptized babies and great figures from history appear in hell. Among the game’s more than 18,000 Facebook friends, many are expressing an interest in the original poem. “You should really read the literature before playing the game,” wrote one Facebook fan. “It’s an awesome story.”
The Facebook page contains another idea.
“A world without video games,” wrote a fan, “now that would be like living in hell.”
This is an edited abbreviated version of a story in Atlantic Monthly Online.
Would some of those “playing” the video game expect some sort of “redemption” or “absolution” by venturing into Dante’s inferno before “judgement day”? If one creates an avatar in the game, could one achieve “eternal” life in “hell”? Sadly, some who play these games might find it an attractive prospect.
I don’t know. I have not played this (or any other) video game myself. But I intend to do so in the near future. I will report to you. You can then cross examine me on the spiritual effect the game has had on me.