Cheap or a the long awaited truth?

Owen Good over at Kotaku recently posted an opinion piece about a current marketing item for Activision's Call of Duty: World at War. You can read the the article here - http://kotaku.com/5080808/where-was-the-editor-on-this-one - and as you can see he takes offense to the how the World War expierience is reduced to a type of prime time TNA commercial.

I like it this video. I understand that those who participated in the events portrayed in this game went through tramautic times, and their actions have deep ramifications, but I really do not need another Saving Private Ryan clone to tell me that I am about to relive a watershed moment in history. While this may not sound very upstanding, the sad truth is no one is going to play this game to get a better understanding of a war survivors expierience. While some games may have done good work to pay respect to the millions who have died in many gruesome battles, this trailer tells the truth: you are going to play this game to blow things up and shoot people to shreds. There are much better way's to pay respect to a war survivor than to play a game from the large selection of World War Two action titles available.

I understand Mr. Good's disdain, and I feel it too, but this trailer is far from the culprit. If anything, this piece of marketing draws our attention to the fact that many of our cheap expieriences are veiled in a sence of historical and moral importance as a means to make them more appealing. Before anyone who reads this decides to tare me a new one for choosing what appears to be the uninformed moral highground that many opponents of video games take when attacking this form, I just think more work needs to be done, thats all. Video games are still a blosseming medium, and while there has been steps forward in the subject matter that is mentioned above, I think that this trailer is quite a revealing piece of work, and it would be much more worthwhie to look at why is elicits disdain rather than to just act in disgust. After all, video games are a massive money making industry, and while marketing can miss the mark fairly often, sometimes it can show us the dark side of what really drives our expieriences.