Dante’s “inferno”, video games, and pop pedagogy

In 2010, Electronic Arts, an American video game company, released the popular Dante’s Inferno on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. In many ways, Dante Alighieri’s poem, Inferno, inspires the game story and informs the game’s design: characters and names; dialogue; settings; and maps. This adaptation gives new life to the poem and introduces many aspects of Dante’s work to a new generation of players, of readers, of students in a vibrant, interactive medium. The goal of the present study is to explore the ways that popular culture – vis-à-vis video games, in this case – can create a new interactive experience for medieval literature and can convey the themes and text of a poem. Video games are powerful teaching and learning tools that we should leverage by virtue of how they engage players and in the increasingly serious – and sometimes academic – content.