I know this may come as a bit of a shock to some people, but war games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 aren’t actually very realistic, despite what the checkpoints and TV ads would have you think. There are no checkpoints in real life, for one thing, and the TV ads are “crass” for another.<\/p>\n
That’s according US Army Paratrooper veteran and columnist, D.B. Grady, who’s called out the ads as “setting a new low” in an essay titled “The Hideous Marketing of Modern Warfare 3” over on The Atlantic.<\/p>\n
The game’s\u00a0 live-action TV ad, featuring Sam Worthington and Jonah Hill, “trivialises combat and sanitises war”, writes Grady.<\/p>\n
“After ten years of constant war, of thousands of amputees and flag-draped coffins, of hundreds of grief-stricken communities, did nobody involved in this commercial raise a hand and say, ‘You know, this is probably a little crass. Maybe we could just show footage from the game’.<\/p>\n
“This is not an argument against so-called shooter video games or depictions of war in popular culture. However, as Afghanistan intensifies and we assess the mental and physical damage to veterans of Iraq, is now really the time to sell the country on how much fun the whole enterprise is? (Here I point to the giddy howls of one supposed soldier in the commercial as he fires a grenade launcher at some off-screen combatant. War is great, see? It’s like a gritty Disneyland.)”<\/p>\n
He’s got a point there, maybe, but I have to wonder how this doesn’t apply to just about every war movie that’s ever been made. Unless everything ends in bloody dismembered limbs and broken families, any representation of war is going to come off a bit trivialised and sanitised.<\/p>\n