The marketing department over at video game company Electronic Arts (EA) are geniuses! As promotion for an upcoming video game, Dante’s Inferno, they staged a fake protest outside their recent video game conference in Los Angelos.
According to the website Game Politics, protestors carried around signs that read, “EA = anti-Christ” and “My high score is in Heaven,” leading witnesses to believe the protesters were Christian and were upset over the game’s content.
The game itself is inspired by “Inferno,” the first book of the poem “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri’s where the character experience hell, where sinners are punished. The video game character apparently has a cross for a weapon.
Some bloggers are taking issue with the publicity stunt, saying it was anti-Christian:
From the Catholic Video Gamers blog:
Gamers of all varieties will buy this product if its, well, actually a good game. So instead of engaging in a shamelessly anti-Christian stunt to promote your poor excuse of a product, maybe you ought to work on making this game, you know, something better than a blatant God of War rip-off and make it, ya know, something worthwhile?
Now, while I cannot attest to whether this game is a “God of War rip off” since I’ve never seen it (or God of War, to be quite honest) I am interested in what exactly was so anti-Christian about the protest.
It’s really not that much of a stretch of the imagination to think some Christians might be offended at a game about hell. So why not play off of that to promote a game?
What do you think? What’s anti-Christian about pretending to protest a game on faith-based grounds?
