Achievement Unlocked: "Bad Nanny"

Dante's Inferno looks great on paper-God of War-style hyper-action title wrapped in the mythos of the legendary epic of Dante's journey through the circles of Hell. At this point, I'd be the first in line to pre-order at my local rip-off store, fumbling through my pocket and searching the floor for loose change to muster enough pennies to pay it off in full. I would, but like everything that deals with the devil, the title comes with sub-fine prints. Cutting through the thick layers of Gluttony and cutting the head off of Greed using the scythe of the devil himself sounds like amazing fun; however, I simply cannot justify the act of killing unbaptized babies who are crawling out of the nipples of a zombified naked giant that is Lust and be rewarded for it.

There's fun, then there's just ****-ed up. And people who're trying to justify killing babies with "it's just a game" need to rethink what they are arguing. I'm all for freedom of speech, and I'd be right up there with Rockstar North, wielding a picket and a torch, outside of Congress, demanding the appreciation of Manhunt as a psychological thrill ride that represents the Catcher in the Ryeof video games. Yet, Dante's Inferno still manages to stir this uneasiness that toys with my morality in games. Does this cutting down menacing babies cross the line or is it all in good fun?

Perhaps I should preface this by saying that I'm not some senile elementary school principal who insists that non-Mario games are all evil and will turn children into zombie terrorists. And I'm not someone who pulls powerpoint presentations and medical research statistics to argue that video games can brainwash little babies into Terrain commander pros who can master the battle fields against the inevitable attack of the Zerg aliens, and Call of Duty playing tweens are trained professional Marines and Firebats who can get triple headshot kills in a single no-scope. I do not believe that video games can train people to do anything beyond sitting in their couches and pushing buttons.

With that said, however, I've performed shoryuuken in my bathroom, and I've had hoduken battles with my brother, so I don't need a research paper to know the effects of video games. Video games are fun. They're so fun that gamers would love nothing more than to actually perform the action. Personally, I'd love to have Dante and Big Boss as my bodyguards and be able to Mirror's Edge my way through New York with the Mario music playing in the background. Now, I'm not saying that killing babies in a video game will translate into killing babies in real life. I've managed to play three Grand Theft Auto games without going on a rampage. But to say that games have no effect is a bit ignorant.

Fortunately, then, Dante's Inferno will not be found tucked next to a Wii in a 10 year old's bedroom. The ESRB has evolved into an effective system with the participation and cooperation from the retailers. Sales associates have been pretty efficient at warning parents of inappropriate contents to parents. So I'm not talking about ruining the foundation of our society here. I'm talking to EA. So EA, after the promise of prostitution and fake religious protests at game events, maybe announcing the "Bad Nanny" achievement is not the best idea right now. I'm sure being able to make a game based on the actual Dante is exciting, but if Sony Santa Monica could make a God of War without including the part where Zeus pretends to be a cow and rapes a little girl in the meadows, I'm sure you can make Dante's weekend get-away through Lust without the inclusion of baby slaughtering and defecated breast implants loaded with creatures.

Some people are going to argue that Dante's Inferno follows the original script so that, to be true to the source material, the giant boob attack is necessary-seriously, it is Lust after all. But that argument is unfounded since the story doesn't actually follow the original script. The game actually seems like a borrowed shell of the original source since Dante's excursion through Hell is not motivated by Dante's pursuit of salvation. Instead, the game tries to sell it as a game about Dante trying to rescue his lost love from the depth of hell-yes, it's Dante's Inferno with the story of Disney's Hercules. So before people start spouting a justified attempt at recreating the original legend, remember that's not what EA is making. Naming the game Dante's Inferno is just an excuse to include a variety of amoral scenes and a hack-and-slash action.

Obviously, I'm not qualified to tell anybody what is acceptable and what isn't, since I am guilty of taking pleasure in shooting virtual people in the head or chainsaw-ing ugly grunts in half. So I'm not going to sit here and hypocritically claim a sense of morality and point at Dante's Inferno and cry foul. But the real problem is how fun is all this brutality. Headshots and chainsaws are fun because it satiates the action-starved bad ass that resides in every boy's soul, and it proves that I am better than you because I can humiliate you with something that requires extreme skill. Yes, shooting people in the head with the bellows of "domination" across the speakers satisfies this sense of superiority and rewards the skilled players, who have put in all those hours honing those crosshair-to-head reflexes. That is to say, I have no problem with video game amorality as long as it re-enforces the game as a medium of entertainment, even serious entertainment like the strip tease in Heavy Rain. However, when a game implements killing babies just to add another bullet point in the number of trophies, then that's just not right. The video game audience is like a group of friends telling racist jokes at an alcohol-involved party, and Dante's Inferno is like the bloke who got too drunk and said, "What do you do when you see a nigger with half a head? Stop laughing and reload." At some point, it just stops being funny.