Activision had an incredibly large marketing budget when promoting Modern Warfare 3; it seemed like every other ad on TV was about the game during their launch week. One of the ads included a hilarious and action-packed commercial starring Sam Worthington and Jonah Hill, appropriately called The Vet & the n00b. I liked it, a lot of other people liked it, but D.B. Grady, former paratrooper with U.S. Army and a veteran of Afghanistan, did not. And he wrote about his feelings concerning the video on The Atlantic website.
"The advertisement trivializes combat and sanitizes war", Grady wrote. "If this were September 10, 2001, maybe it wouldn't be quite so bad. Those who are too young to remember Vietnam might indulge in combat fantasies of resting heart rates while rocket-propelled grenades whiz by, and of flinty glares while emptying a magazine into the enemy. But 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'."
I won't comment on any of that because I have no idea what war really is like and hopefully never will, but after rewatching the ad, I still really enjoy it.
