Call of Duty games have never shied away from sensitive and political subject matter, but when Activision’s official Call of Duty account started "live reporting" a fictional terrorist attack, we saw a marketing move exit the realm of entertainment.

2.88 million people follow the @callofduty Twitter account, which recently rebranded its page to reflect its new name: Current Events Aggregate, a faux news outlet whose tagline is "We bring you the real news." The Call of Duty social media page update was pretty believable: Save for the small grey text that said "callofduty," it looked like a media outlet on the Twitter timeline.It tried very hard to not look like Call of Duty.So when Activision started tweeting about a terrorist attack in Singapore, it could very easily have been misinterpreted. I think this was the purpose. The publicity stunt appears to be deliberately confusing, and to mislead someone into thinking people have been harmed purely for the sake of marketing is dirty."Current Events Aggregate" began by tweeting articles about fashion and movies, both out of context and seemingly unrelated to Call of Duty. The next one was a terrorist attack tweeted in real time. It read:"BREAKING NEWS: Unconfirmed reports are coming in of an explosion on the North bank of the Singapore Marina."The Twitter response was almost unanimously confusion.18 tweets later, the story ended, the Current Events Aggregator imagery went away, and that was that. Call of Duty was Call of Duty again.Four hours after the initial tweet, and two hours after the final one in this fake story, @callofduty updated, simply, "This was a glimpse into the future fiction of #BlackOps3 ."This accomplishes nothing. I don't know what I'm supposed to learn or gain from this that makes anyone more interested in Black Ops III.While it's simple enough to figure out this whole thing is fake by clicking through and seeing the username, Activision is looking for attention at any cost. It exploited peoples' empathy and fear of tragedy to drive retweets and pre-orders.That's depressing.This story would have been better conveyed, more understandable, and arguably exciting in another trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops III . Call of Duty games are easily identifiable as fiction, and you can immediately get into that. Tragedy as entertainment works; tricking people into thinking Singapore is really under attack as a piece of marketing is irresponsible.This sort of marketing is bad for video games, bad for the community, and bad for anyone who mistakenly misunderstood something Activision intentionally misrepresented.

Mitch Dyer is an Editor at IGN. Talk to him about Dota 2, movies, books, and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch