It has been years since video games surpassed blockbuster movies as the biggest releases in media, but that's never stopped games makers wanting to get a slice of the action on the big screen. Now Call of Duty's makers Activision Blizzard are planning an assault to rival Disney's Marvel Universe. It plans to use the multi-layered, interconnected approach that has made Marvel's superheroes a dominant force in cinema to turn the first-person shooter into an all-conquering film franchise of its own. Two people are tasked with pulling that off, Stacey Sher and Nick van Dyk, the co-presidents of Activision Blizzard Studios, an in-house production division that hopes to succeed where almost everyone else has failed by turning games into commercially and critically successful film and TV. According to the pair, work on the Call of Duty films has already generated multiple scripts, and involved extensive research with military experts and retired soldiers.

This is not a controversial statement. A quick trip through recent cinematic history reveals a universally dismal track record. This is a genre whose high point is the Resident Evil series, whose touchstones include Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Prince of Persia. This summer's Angry Birds and World of Warcraft may have produced legitimate commercial successes, but that's only thanks to the Chinese market. In the US they both tanked, commercially and critically.

Multinomial probit (MNP) model for discrete choice modeling is often used in economics, market research, political sciences and transportation. It models the choices made by agents given their demographic characteristics and/or the features of the K 2 available choice alternatives. Examples include the study of consumer's purchasing behavior (e.g., McCulloch et al. (2000); Imai and van Dyk (2005)); voting behavior in multi-party elections (e.g., Quinn et al. (1999)); and choice of different modes of transportation (e.g., Bolduc (1999)). Details of the MNP model in which choices depend on predictors in a linear fashion is studied in McFadden et al.(1973); McFadden(1989); Keane(1992); McCulloch and Rossi (1994); Nobile (1998); McCulloch et al. (2000); Imai and van Dyk (2005); Train (2009); Burgette and Nordheim (2012) among others. Among widely used multinomial choice modeling procedures are the multinomial logit model (e.g., McFadden et al. (1973); Train (2009)) and multinomial probit model (e.g., McFadden (1989); McCulloch and Rossi (1994); Imai and van Dyk (2005)). The former relies on an assumption that a choice outcome is independent of removal (or introduction) of an irrelevant choice alternative while the latter including MPBART does not make this restrictive assumption.