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Kobe Bryant’s Call Of Duty Commercial Is Kind Of A Big Deal?

By now, you’ve probably seen the viral Call of Duty: Black Ops commercial featuring Kobe Bryant. The game is being called the best ever. It’s setting sales records.

And since Kobe’s in the commercial, it’s become, you know, column-fodder. When the “Black Mamba” is involved, anything that can be turned into a controversy, will. Because of hisrocky past.

Tim Keown of ESPN writes a piece profiling a mortuary worker in Oakland who tries to steer kids away from violence. Keown intimates that Kobe’s presence sends the wrong message to the youth of Oakland:

At the end of the spot, the tag line — “There’s a soldier in all of us” — manages to diminish and trivialize the work of real soldiers while sending one of the most irresponsible messages in the history of advertising.

Keown’s piece is finely sculpted–he uses a tragic circumstance to drive a point home. The problem? There’s no real link between Kobe partaking in this ad and violence occurring. If there’s any spike in violence in Oakland because of this, then he’d be on to something.

But…Are teens on corners who see this commercial more likely to go to buy an Xbox or a gun after watching this commercial? A kid is more likely to think, whoa, ‘Kobe is the man. I want to go work on my jump shot so I can get paid like he does.’ Not, ‘damn, Kobe’s hard. I’m going to kill someone so I can be like him.’

Billy Witz, a writer for Fox, put Kobe’s ad in perspective:

Bryant has cultivated a tough guy image on the court, but his growing up belies that. He spent his adolescence on the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia, and now lives in a gated community that separates him from the mean streets of Newport Beach. If there’s a soldier in that guy, there has to be one in us, right?

And that’s the point of video games. Playing a video game, becoming a black op, it’s a fantasy. It allows the overweight and the unathletic, the couch-potato and the stoner, to become something they are decidedly not. Just how NBA Jam or FIFA let us become our favorite athletes, games like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo let us take on the war hero fantasy.

Kobe doesn’t want to talk about the commercial, and he shouldn’t have to. He’s getting paid to be in an ad. He’s not promoting gang violence. He’s promoting a video game that is a diversion and a distraction–it should just be left  at that.