Gamerizing Dante’s Inferno

Okay, so “gamerize” is a term I just made up. But, as a full-time grad student, now, I have some license to do such things. In fact, it’s sort of expected of us so long as we take at least ten double-spaced pages to define the term. But I’ll spare me the pain of writing it, and you the torture of reading it…

As the title of the post suggests, there is, in fact, a video game adaptation of The Inferno due to be released on February 9th, called Dante’s Inferno. It’s published by Electronic Arts, and is developed by one of EA’s in-house teams, Visceral (more on EA later***). As you can tell by the screenshot above, the game takes significant liberties with Dante’s medieval classic.

Below is a story trailer for the game from IGN’s website. There is an age gate, but the trailer is safe for work, so to speak.

The early reviews I’ve seen have painted the game as a hack-&-slash bit of mayhem. These games tend to emphasize twitchy controls, quick reflexes, and button combinations that need precision timing to be executed well. Hence, Dante’s emotional journey from the original poem will, uh, take a back seat so that players can slay the undead and pull some killer stunts.

That said, it does appear that some shell of Dante Alighieri’s original story is intact, just slanted through the prism of mainstream gaming culture. I’m actually somewhat surprised this hasn’t happened earlier. Game developers have pilfered ancient Greek and Roman mythology for decades, and medieval Europe has certainly been the inspiration for a whole swath of game culture, digital and otherwise. From what I can tell, Dante’s Inferno looks much more like a mash-up of the original poem with other heroic and anti-heroic inspirations. The game is clearly ripping some of its elements from the current pinnacle of the hack-&-slash genre, God of War (a game revolving entirely around Greek mythology). For some reason, I can’t help but think of both Gilgamesh and Beowulf when I see the trailer. And, much as Dante himself was aware, a hero traveling through an underworld — literal or otherwise — is a motif with which all of us here at the pub are very familiar. Travis’s 2007 Prophecy presentation provides a superb explanation of the Hero’s Journey and the role that death plays in its fulfillment. (And for those of you either haven’t seen it or could use a refresher, it’s a pretty nifty examination of some key characters and their roles in HP, as well!)

As a number of game and media scholars have pointed out in recent years, games are fertile proving grounds for players to pursue hero quests. The framework lends itself quite well to game development, providing a near perfect template for pacing a player’s progress through levels while narrating a character’s development into a persona players connect with. Whether you’re playing games like this, which generally means you’re playing alone, or if you’re playing online in a massively multiplayer game, the steps to the Hero’s Journey appears all over the place. If you’re not familiar with massively multiplayer games — usually called MMOs — are often built around a system that demands the player run through a series of trials before heading off to a main mission. Sometimes, these can be small tasks, such as gathering resources like gold or weapons. In other instances, players might have to defeat one major enemy character before moving on to bigger, badder challenges. Though there are clear differences between the Hero’s Journey as we have come to understand it and what often happens in games, there is also significant overlap making the influence pretty clear.

***EA is a controversial company in the gaming world for a number of reasons. Gamers most often complain of the quality of games, which can often be shoddy and half-hearted at best. On the business side, EA’s reputation might best be described as “the Microsoft of the gaming world.” They are, in fact, the largest third party game developer in the world, which makes them (at least at one point) the second largest software company in the world — right behind Microsft. EA has thrown that muscle around quite a bit over the last few years. Combined with their size and financial clout, EA has been able to sew up the rights to the National Football League in an exclusive deal that forbids any other company from making an NFL game. They can make football games, but not using the NFL license. Many gamers felt like this was a huge problem because, at the time, EA’s Madden NFL franchise had been suffering a steady decline in quality. Many consumers interpreted the move as a way for EA to squelch competition to Madden rather than rising to the challenge of improved game design driven by a competitive market.

The company also courted some controversy last year when the game’s development was first unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka E3), which is the single largest annual video game event in the United States. A small band of protesters showed up to voice their displeasure over the game’s content, claiming it was sacrilegious and anti-Christian. Very quickly, though, some in the game community sniffed a hoax, which EA confirmed a few days later. They hired a group of folks to pose as concerned Christians unhappy with the game’s violence and use of religious iconography.

Tagged as: Dante Alighieri, Dante's Inferno, Games, games studies, Hero's Question, The Inferno