Published my first piece for The Atlantic today about the video gamer version of Dante’s Inferno.

What makes this story work is the tension between staying faithful to the original text and pleasing the gaming community. The game’s developers went out of their way to talk about how they kept many elements of the poem intact, while simultaneously reassuring gamers that they had ditched all the sissy stuff.

The gaming community was actually offended by the marketing campaign for this title. I think it would have been a lot braver, and commercially savvy, to create a game that used Dante’s fear and fragility instead of ditching it for an a stock action hero.

Still I applaud the developers for trying something this ambitious and for bringing attention to such a great work of classic literature.