Bob Mackey types up a long but interesting blog article about the relationship we've seen developed and forever changing between video games and literature. Check out the link for the full three pages!

When Electronic Arts announced their plans to produce a video game based on the literary classic Dante's Inferno, gamers were outraged by more than just the title's uncanny resemblance to the God of War franchise. Question the literacy of those who indulge in our hobby all you want, but the generally negative reactions that greeted the interactive adaptation of Dante Alighieri's epic poem speak well for our kind's classical training. To the credit of these dissenters, Visceral Games really did go about handling their source material in a way that can only be described as "comically pandering"; the gore, bare breasts, and generic video game badassitude of the digital Dante seem like a concerted effort to strip the dignity from a treasured work of art.

The influence of something like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of The Rings on video games is colossal and worthy of its own examination altogether; and unsurprisingly, when you peel back all of Tolkien's meticulous details, you'll find the skeleton of a monomyth -- with all the bones represented. Even relatively recent sensations like The Matrix (at least, the original film) can be broken down neatly into the basic parts identified by Campbell. Thousands of years after human beings started telling their first stories, we still appreciate some degree of familiarity.

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