Seen@E3: Protesting Dante's Inferno

by David Hinkle { Jun 3rd 2009 at 4:45PM }

Outside of the entrance to the South Hall here at the LA Convention Center, there are a group of people protesting EA's new game, Dante's Inferno. Featuring witty signs such as "Cheat codes won't save your soul" and "My high score is in Heaven," one must wonder if this is simply a protest, or a PR stunt.

Tags: dantes-inferno, e3-2009, ea

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)

Crusty Magic @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:47PM

Wow, absolute fail if those people aren't being paid to do that.

Heh @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:50PM

They're totally being paid to do this, even if they never admit it.

Chris D.(PSN: Aggie_CEO | XBL:The Aggie CEO | Steam: Aggie_CEO @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:54PM

ummmm never knew you got paid to protest....lol

Eh @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:02PM

absolute fail that people think this is real

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:04PM

Guys, this is a PR stunt. Most of you already fell however you do about the church, but this is did not come from the church, it came from a marketing firm. You will only look more ignorant for spouting off about how stupid these protesters are and how typical it is of the Christians you know.

Dy-lon @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:11PM

Does Dante know about this? Oh yeah...right...I forgot.

Welcome Nick!!! @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:13PM

I don't care if this is PR or not, but I'm a Bible believing Christian and just got done laughing so hard tears are still streaming down my face. This is one of the funniest things I've seen all day.

343 Guilty Fart @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:13PM

"Most of you already fell however you do about the church"

Um, yeah. (???)

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:19PM

I meant people tend to form their philosophical or religious opinions by their teens, and then they generally don't question those beliefs much later in life. Hence, for something like this, few will pause and consider whether this is real if they already have a negative opinion of religion.

offday @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:06PM

They're paid to do it for sure. This game isn't that big to be protested. GTA doesn't even get protesters.

NoughtSoClever @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:49PM

So I take it 'KillJebus' isn't just a clever name.

jahd5000 @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:57PM

im christian catholic and i tottally dont get their attitude... maybe those are crazy christians non catholic who think that is linking thir children to the devil or sin or something... idiots.. but there is plenty of people close minded like this, it is rated M, that should do, shouldnt it?

still very funny XD

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:59PM

Killjebus, I have a bridge you might be interested in.

xbox420king @ Jun 3rd 2009 8:41PM

The fat ones face looks like she is thinking to her self .."where is
that 50 and my hotdog EA promised?"

Saria the Cat @ Jun 3rd 2009 9:27PM

Killjebus, the very fact that you spell "Christian" as "Xtian" just proves that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and if you do, you don't know how to communicate that effectively.

Crusty Magic @ Jun 3rd 2009 9:34PM

He's just representing most of the people on this site who can't communicate their thoughts without resorting to 1337 tactics.

Next discussion: Xtains vs. Mu$lims

offday @ Jun 3rd 2009 10:10PM

Killjebus, you're an idiot. Why is it confirmed? Just because you said so. Idiot with an idiot name, go figure.

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 10:19PM

@Killjebus "Never, evaevaevaevaevaevaevaevaevaevaeva......(thinks Smokey from Friday) underestimate the STUPIDITY of the Xtian right."

Well, I'm part of your so-called "Christian right," I've been interested in this game ever since I heard about it and I knew this was a marketing ploy the instant I saw it (the links you provide make it even more obvious, which is what really baffles me).

http://wearesavedgroup.org/ (the pseudo viral marketing campaign site, which encourages you to take up arms against the game by... visiting the game's site).

Via this guy http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/E3-2009-Christians-Protest-Dantes-Inferno who, despite being hostile to religion, at least had the common sense to know a publicity stunt when he saw it.

Vidikron @ Jun 4th 2009 12:32AM

LOL... OK, I admit that with the website and youtube video it's clearly a PR stunt.

Tay @ Jun 4th 2009 1:50AM

They're being paid, I heard it from a friend at work who was talking about her friend who works at EA that this was going to happen before it ever did :)

damian @ Jun 4th 2009 3:04AM

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v630/edom78/DI_AD.jpg

I hope this is the real deal... if so they took this and ran with it...

ahahah

BananaBoat @ Jun 4th 2009 5:13AM

This has got to be fake. For one thing, you'd have probably heard the name of whatever church was protesting (and it would be some odd-ball church with a record of doing stuff like this). For another...Cheat codes won't save your soul? Really?

Fake.

james @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:49PM

No one is forcing these jesus freaks to play the game so they should mind their own fucking business.

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:58PM

They're being paid. If you can't see that, you're pretty ignorant of religious culture in the US.

Dan @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:03PM

I don't think you realize how stupid religious individuals are, especially the ones protesting the title of a game.

There's a reason 92% of scientists are Atheists.

james @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:06PM

i figured they were just crazy.

james @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:12PM

@ chispito. Wait, your saying i'm ignorant because i believe something like this could actually happen? is it so ridiculous to think so? don't stupid protests like this happen alot? I saw a picture a group of Americans protesting "the computer is a homo devil machine" cause a gay man invented it or something.

fakingmyself @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:36PM

@ Dan : You came up with that statistic out of your ass ?

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:40PM

Sure, Christians sometimes hold this style of protest, but:

1) Seriously, who would sweat something like this? Hardly anything is known about the game, which is based on a classic, pro-Christian source.

2) Even if some church group were so inclined, this wasn't on anybody's radar. I don't recall hearing about protests over Diablo 1 or 2, which this likely rips off, and everybody knew those were going to sell like hotcakes.

I can't remember the last time I saw an organized religious protest over a product of the media. Heck, other than the Roman Catholic Church's statements against Angels and Demons, and their refusal to work with Ron Howard, it's not like I saw or heard of any protests about the movie. And that was known to be heavily anti-religious.

People get so hardened in their opinions of groups of people--not even about their underlying beliefs, but the people themselves--that they are willing to accept any negative proposition about them at face value, even if a moment's pause should show how dubious that proposition is.

Vidikron @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:47PM

"I can't remember the last time I saw an organized religious protest over a product of the media. Heck, other than the Roman Catholic Church's statements against Angels and Demons, and their refusal to work with Ron Howard, it's not like I saw or heard of any protests about the movie. And that was known to be heavily anti-religious."

You're kidding, right? Small protests like this happen by the hundreds all the time. They may just not reach higher than local news levels most of the time. There were quite a few protests for Da Vinci Code and even book burnings over Harry Potter. Although not directly religious in nature, there was a protest over the movie Tropic Thunder outside one of the theater where I live. I doubt you heard about that, but that's my point.

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:54PM

Is it enough to say I've never met any religious people who would have heard of this game and known to go to E3 to protest it, and would have made such nice signs that feature slogans fit for a magazine ad, including, as many have pointed out, EA's trademark logo?

Vidikron @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:59PM

First off, this is a really small group. So claiming you've never met any religious person that heard of it is meaningless. It's not like this is a million man march or something. Second, using the logo is also meaningless to your point. The point of a protest would be to make sure people seeing it would understand whom you are protesting. Using EAs logo would only help that.

Sizer @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:08PM

Let me introduce you to Poe's Law - http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law

Applied here it says that unless the protestors admit it, or you can trace something back to a marketing firm or some other smoking gun, there is no way you can tell the difference between a bunch of genuinely stupid people and a bunch of people trying to parody being stupid. Because no matter how hard the fakers try there is a real person out there doing something even more genuinely ridiculous.

All these arguments based on how they look, how the signs look (All the 'EA's look the same! Almost as if they were all paid off! ... or maybe they just drew the posters together based on a logo they got from the website because none of them knew how it looked otherwise) are fun to wank about but prove nothing either way.

Vidikron @ Jun 3rd 2009 6:13PM

Yeah, honestly, I don't care one bit whether it's real or not and, in fact, haven't said one way or the other. I just don't see any proof that it is fake. I've seen hundreds of stupid religious protests and this is certainly well within the realms of possibility. I just didn't care for a couple people going around calling others stupid and/or gullible when their own position is completely unsubstantiated.

Saria the Cat @ Jun 3rd 2009 9:31PM

@Dan: Real scientists don't pull random, sourceless statistics out of their asses. Real thinkers also don't assume other people are stupid due to their affiliation with a culture (i.e. religion)).

chispito @ Jun 3rd 2009 10:44PM

Sizer: http://wearesavedgroup.org/ is that proof enough they're paid by EA's marketing budget?

You can say whatever law you want applies, but it was patently obvious they were paid. The signs were too slogan-y, the timing was too perfect, and besides, nobody who wasn't a gamer had heard of this game before.

Robert Maynard @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:49PM

Dan.. just.. no.
The statistic is that a 1996 survey of the members found that 93% of scientists in the US NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES are atheists, of which there are about 2000 members. Not all scientists. I mean, okay, fair enough, members of the National Academy of Sciences are ..basically some of the best scientists in the world, but that's besides the point. :P
From Wiki's article on atheist demographics (to give you a sense of how easy this would have been to independently inquire and provide citations): "In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God" (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences."

- Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).
- Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997)

Honestly, lern2atheistn00b.

Robert Maynard @ Jun 4th 2009 12:02AM

And even then, the results produced by the standards of doubt defined in the surveys deal with a very specific form of deity, gods that can relate to humans and interact with them; it does not account for agnosticism and lingering beliefs in "prime movers" and Spinozan deities. In other words, by no means do the people that express doubt or positive disbelief in the proposition in the survey automatically count as atheists.

Furthermore keep in mind that the 93% NAS figure is from 1996, over 13 years and one two-term right-wing administration ago. 85% is a more conservative estimate I've seen floated in the 00s.