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My colleague and coworker Leigh Alexander yesterday published a semi-defense Purchase Synthroid, of Visceral Games' (nee EA Redwood Shores) upcoming "adaptation" of Dante's Inferno (entitled Dante's Inferno). By "semi-defense" I mean she didn't explicitly and enthusiastically endorse the game, but generally supported its right to exist under EARS' chosen title and its self-professed association with a work that, to a large extent, where to buy Synthroid, set the direction for the modern Italian language.
It's definitely a reasonable point of view. Synthroid maximum dosage, Certainly no developer has any responsibility to be particularly literary or high-minded. Anyone who listens to Idle Thumbs knows my personal distaste for the game is hyperbolic and probably comically exaggerated at times. But, actually, it's a genuine frustration, because to me it is emblematic a larger issue, Purchase Synthroid. Here, slightly tweaked, Synthroid images, is the comment I made in response to Leigh's post:
"I just don't see why this is based on Dante's Inferno. If, Rx free Synthroid, as some have claimed, the core market doesn't care about the game's adherence to its 'source material' -- and surely it doesn't -- what usefulness is it to claim association in the first place.
"This could have been simply a game influenced by Dante's imagery, as so many creative works have been over the centuries, Synthroid dangers, rather than actually claiming to be any kind of even remotely meaningful adaptation of the poem. To me, What is Synthroid, it's an amazing vindication of the claims of video games' inability to thoughtfully construct ANY kind of meaningful thought: here's how video games adapt one of Western culture's defining literary works, and it consists of brutally ripping apart demons for eight hours, surely complete with idiotic throwaway one-liners. Purchase Synthroid, "I know it's not the duty of any individual game designer to 'justify' games to anyone who doesn't play them, and it shouldn't be, and obviously as a gamer I know full well that games are capable of more than this. But the reality is that most games DON'T have anything to say; most games DON'T communicate any meaningful thought; and most games DON'T deal with their subject matter in anything other than the basest, Synthroid use, most ridiculous way. You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, Purchase Synthroid online, but it's certainly even more true for games.
"That's clearly not a dealbreaker for me, since I still play a lot of video games, including the ones covered in the category I described above, buy Synthroid no prescription, and it doesn't bother me all that much; if it did, I wouldn't play, Get Synthroid, write about, and talk about so many games.
"But by claiming to have anything to do with Dante's Inferno, this game loudly echoes that trend in a particularly frustrating way, real brand Synthroid online. It could have simply been called 'Righteous Duty' or whatever bullshit name [edit: Clint Hocking suggests 'Demon Hunter,' 'To Hell and Back,' 'Love be Damned,' 'Infernal'] with the same plot and mechanics -- they could have even given Dante a shoutout in their ridiculous PR pitches -- and I don't think I would have batted an eye, Purchase Synthroid. But as the game industry's big-budget, highly-publicized representation of a work that everybody knows by cultural osmosis, My Synthroid experience, even if they've never read a word of it, it's a big huge fucking depressing failure."
God of War, which many have pointed out as a counterpoint to the general opinion I espouse, takes that latter approach, online Synthroid without a prescription. But while I'm not personally a God of War fan, it doesn't offend me as a gamer; it's just not my kind of game, Synthroid samples, mechanically speaking.
God of War is directly influenced by Greek mythology, but it doesn't claim any kind of definitive association with a particular work in its title. Rather, online buying Synthroid, it uses the cultural source material as a rough touchstone. Purchase Synthroid, Dante's Inferno, ironically, appears to depart even more from its source material than God of War does, but makes an implicit claim that it is more related.
As Clint Hocking points out in a comment following mine, this also has the side effect of delegitimizing any hypothetical future video game interpretations of The Divine Comedy. (There have been "adaptations" in the past, but none with anywhere near the visibility and marketing might of an Electronic Arts production.) It basically guarantees the video game take on Dante's epic to be juvenile nonsense. It may be a fun video game; I make no claims about that one way or the other, but it certainly isn't what its title says it is.
I also don't mean to imply I have any desire for a better Divine Comedy game; it's never something I've particularly longed for, and I don't mean to call for it now. I'm not saying EA should be making a game closer to the source material; I'm saying they should never have claimed the association to begin with.
If none of my arguments have been at all convincing, just load up this incredible video and skip to about 4:50. Maybe the whole interview is a piss take. But is that really relevant, when it appears to be 100% accurate anyway.
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Tags: clint hocking, dante's inferno, demon hunter, ears, infernal, leigh alexander, love be damned, rightous duty, to hell and back, visceral games
June 8th, 2009 at 8:39 am
The Jace Hall show seems to stage a majority of its interviews to be more entertaining than factual, but the fact still stands: Dante’s Inferno has an enemy called a goddamned “Lust Minion.”
June 8th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I’m hoping at some point we get the full story of how this game got greenlit. Someone at EA must have a pretty strong opinion of Dante’s brand and its ability to move copies. Or perhaps the devs even more cynical than I am and knew they couldn’t get this project greenlit without a franchise behind it, and Little Nicky was just too expensive.
On the bright side, this has given me the impetus to start work on my own third person open world shooter, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Streets of LA. Look for it next fall on Gizmondo.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I understand where the hate for this game is coming from, but to me it seems that this kind of complaint falls into the same category as someone complaining about Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet.
Right now we’re looking at this as “Dante’s Inferno adapted as a video game” which is the wrong approach. What we should actually look at it as is “Dante’s Inferno adapted as an action video game” which makes the whole affair much less offensive.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Drew,
I don’t really think so. Luhrman’s adaptation is, undeniably, an adaption, regardless of whether one thinks it’s a good or bad one. This game seems more from the Japanese RPG school of religious allusion, which is to take a bunch of names, vague plot conceits, and settings, and mash them together haphazardly into a standard video game formula. It’s fine to do that if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not an adaptation, regardless of what genre modifier you disclaim it with.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“Most games DON’T communicate any meaningful thought … You could say the same for most fiction of any medium, but it’s certainly even more true for games.”
I’ve been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Podcast lately, in which the host interviews a different writer on each episode. You’d be surprised at how much thought goes into even the most explosion-riddled action flick.
Have you seen The Island? It’s standard Michael Bay fare, with a dystopian clone world as the backdrop for shakycam and over-the-top special effects. The movie was written by the same guys who did the new Star Trek’s screenplay, and during the Trek interview, they mentioned that they had much loftier ideas for The Island, which were never realized once Bay and the studio got a hold of the script.
Even The Dark Knight—on the surface, a fairly standard adaptation of a classic superhero series, albeit with exceptional acting on the part of some of the players—had a ton of thought and care put into the themes and characters.
I think the biggest problem with storytelling in games right now is that most developers don’t know how to craft a protagonist. Either they’re non-existent, as in most first-person games, or they’re absolutely flawless, with no room to grow and develop.
At their core, stories are about characters. If we can’t create compelling* characters, we can’t tell compelling** stories.
*Sorry.
**Sorry, again.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
[...] is a comment I wrote (with slight edits) on Chris Remo’s response to the question of Dante’s Inferno: essentially, whether it’s a “good [...]
June 9th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Attaching themselves to a recognizable name—who hasn’t heard of “Dante’s Inferno”?—may be a way of adding some security to what is, technically, new IP. There’s safety in an adaptation as there is in a movie tie-in or sequel: it doesn’t have to work so hard to convince people to risk their money on it.
There’s publicity too, even if it is about how the game isn’t really like Dante’s poem (and is instead a fast-paced hack n’ slash—exactly what EA’s PR hopes to get across).
June 10th, 2009 at 6:04 am
I think that title doesn’t just discredits the hypothetical guys that’d like to do an honest adaptation. It discredits the whole industry. There are people who’d like video games to be a mature media, like cinema or books or whatever. What if the casual gamer decides to check out a game called ‘Dante’s Inferno’? It sounds like serious matter, not like ‘Ghosbusters’, or ‘Assassin’s Creed’ or ‘God of War’ or whatever. Granted, she should probably know better than to judge the game by the box, but never mind. Suppose she even reads some review and gets disappointed by them. She’s still comes away disappointed. And the next ting we know, nobody publishes serious games cause hey! Only dumb kids play them anyway.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I think your debate with Leigh here is very similar to a recent debate between Gus Mastrapaand John Teti over on Crispy Gamer, regarding the Godfather II.
I’m of two minds on this subject, but I think your basic point is well-taken: these adaptations can’t harm the recognized on which they are based, but the total incongruity between the maturity and artistic seriousness of the source material and the utter stupidity of the adaptation really degrades the medium.
June 11th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Iriquois:
Well said; that is a concise and accurate way of putting it.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:44 am
To be fair, the source material has some pretty idiotic one-liners of it’s own. Doesn’t one canto (italian poetry terminology?) end with a demon turning around and playing a trumpet with his butt?
February 11th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
hamilton:
Yes, it does conclude with “and he had made a bugle of his arse”, but that is actually more than a one-liner; it, while being humorous, is meant to illustrate the stupid futility of the demons in the use of what were originally meant to be real, good gifts. It’s not exactly a 007 line.