Abandon all, whatever, you know.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Scotland.





My enfranchisement, and interest, in the world of video gaming has these days been limited to being something of a metic; Still loyally following Penny Arcade, reading IGN and watching X-Play on lazy Sundays, but 100% WoW sober for four years now, I of course had heard about the new Dante's Inferno and read some of the reviews of its beta. And mostly I shared Master Tycho's sentiments that even as molested as the seven centuries old poem has become in the game's, I hesitate to call it a storyline, absolutely whatever shimshams or bamboozles can be used to inch unsuspecting Halo jocks towards classic literature ought to be immediately employed with all possible cunning. Never mind that The Supreme Poet was exiled from Florence for his political ties to the White Gulephs as they flailed to regain power, and not for overseeing the massacre of thousands of Saracens at Arce (during Dante's period of activity before his journey the Ayyubid Sultanate had already retaken the city from the Knights of St. John.) I spent years in a creative writing program. I'm all for things that can't have really happened.


Guess which Dante wrote a scathing indictment of Boniface VIII, and which one sowed a cross onto his own skin?









And it's not that I'm particularly threatened by the genre EA chose for it's direct-to-dvd...cross-promotional, deal mechanics, revenue streams, jargon, synergy. I consider anime that's not Miyazaki to be quite shallow, trafficking in only broad, predictable, uncomfortably pubescent archetypes, and a symptom, along with all their body pillows and vending machines, of Japan's prolonged nervous breakdown.

But I think this trailer provoked me for a couple reasons: 1. It defeats any evangelizing the game might do for its source material, because movies in general, and particularly something as challenging and often dependent on having historical knowledge as The Divine Comedy, are far more accessible than books. 2. The treatment of Beatrice. Dante as a crusader, I get. It's a trope of bad medieval storytelling that your protagonist just has to be a crusader. Whatever. And from a storytelling point of view, I do understand that "Luke needs to rescue the Princess" is way catchier than "Italian man humbles himself on journey of cleansing self-discovery and faints a lot." But in my heart, I can't really let go of the fact that the whole plot happens because Beatrice intercedes for Dante from heaven, not because she gets kidnapped by Satan. People pray for Dante, and those prayers come to Beatrice who asks Mary to help him, and she empowers Beatrice to hook Dante up with Virgil and sign him up for the tour. Even if you've lost your way in the forest, even if the road to the delectable mountain is barred and you've gone as far as you yourself can go, you can still be saved by other people who care about you. Even people who are gone. It's a beautiful, quiet, warm interpretation of Christian ideals.

I didn't care when it was just a bad video game that comically happened to be based on a piece of world literature, and one basically responsible for the formation of the Italian language at that. There are plenty of good video games with sophisticated, compelling plots, to which I can devote my time. Good video games with bad plots, too, come to that. But somehow making it a movie, removing the relevant, and possibly compelling, element of gameplay from the enterprise and leaving only a battered, unstable lattice of a story, bothered me enough to force me to sit down and rant about it, making me late for a pub crawl meeting up with some friends.

All that being said, I'm totally gonna get drunk and watch it when it comes out. Will write about Scottish things another time.