How much more can our society glorify war, violence, and antisocial behavior if not by showing real people enjoying the death and destruction of a sovereign nations' citizens and towns as if it's a sport? Maybe I wouldn't find the video as disturbing if it did involve a war that is currently active with soldiers and innocent civilians dying every day...
In my opinion, all the ad and game it's trying to sell succeeds at doing is furthering the dehumanization of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who've died and continue to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and anywhere else our military/CIA/war contractors are operating without our knowledge. Perhaps if the commercial was set in Chicago, Boston, NYC, or some other US city that used to be a functioning community before being ravaged by war, people would have a different response. After all, is this how you'd like your hometown portrayed in the media of another nation that is still actively killing US civilians (accidental or not)?
As the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Schwarzenegger v Entertainment Merchants Association case involving California's ability to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors, I feel like this commercial is a perfect example of the normalization of war/violence endemic in our media caused in part by video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops, which will only get worse as graphics become more realistic.
Perhaps I'm just overreacting or idealizing the games that I grew up playing but I see a big difference between hyper-realistic games like Call of Duty and cartoon-based games like Contra, Double Dragon, and even early editions of Grand Theft Auto.
One thing that I find interesting as the Entertainment Merchants Association argues that it's members free speech is somehow different than other forms of regulated commercial speech like porn, alcohol, and cigarettes is that CallOfDuty.com requires people to be over 18 in order to access the site, employing the same online age verification tool as the very industries it's trying to claim differentiation from. See for yourself:In case you think this game is an anomaly or an exception, here are some statistics on the Call of Duty series:
- Modern Warfare (previous release in the series) holds the single-day record for any entertainment medium with $401 million in sales (4.7 million copies sold) when it was released on 11/10/2009.
- Pre-orders of Black Ops are on track to match sales of Modern Warfare
- The Call of Duty series (7 games total) has accounted for more than $4 billion in sale
As a side note, if a Supreme Court Justice has never played a modern video game, does that disqualified them to hear the case?
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