Remember that trailer for "Dante's Inferno," from the Super Bowl I called out on Monday? Over at my other home on
TheAtlantic.com, Benjamin Popper has
a great piece about adapting literature for gameplay, and how the latter can lead back to the former:
But in a world where the average teenager now spends eight-and-half hours a day in front of a screen, the video-game version of Dante's Inferno may in fact turn out to be a terrific modelfor how to introduce people to dense, difficult works of classic literature. “I wouldn’t say this project is damned from the get go,” says Prof. Saiber. “The hope is that the game will lead people back to the poem.”
As Guy Raffa, a professor at the University of Texas, observes, “teaching Dante, you learn quickly that students need to visualize what’s happening.” To help with this, he createdDanteworlds, a multimedia companion web site to the poem that mixes illustration and audio with the original text. "I found that classes who used the website had higher quiz scores and that the discussion in class got to a higher level much faster."
The video game, then, could lay a similar foundation. It 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."
Hey, if it works, maybe we can get a badass
Paradise Lost video game? That might actually lure me back to a computer for the first time in years. And no more of this crappy-CGI fallen angel trash that
Legion was, either. I want me an amazing big-screen Satan.