The USS Quad Damage

An excuse to talk in the third person

Role Playing in FPS?

We were playing Cod4 yesterday, and there was a player on the other team named "Elmo". This wasn't strange in itself. Lots of people have unexpected avatars in a game. Elmo was very good, consistently being on the top of the team's leaderboard. The only surprise there is that he wasn't clearly part of some clan (Clan {SeS} perhaps?). At the end of the game he said something not immediately shocking, but it was something which grew to bother me:

Elmo: The only person who did well was Elmo.

Initially, that sounds like hubris. Initially, I thought he was joking -- pretending to be someone else praising Elmo's skill. It took a few seconds to realise that he was speaking about himself in the third person. Still hubris, but now as some sort of monarch. It took a little while to register who the avatar was in real life.

Elmo is a character from Sesame Street who talks about himself in the third person. Elmo, the player, was in effect pretending to be Elmo from sesame street. It was like some sort of twisted role playing. He clearly wasn't a serious role player, because the very idea of Elmo (effectively a cartoon character) in a serious, war setting, is preposterous. In addition, he ripped off a character from a TV show rather than creating his own. However, he clearly saw more to it than just a name, and felt the need to adopt the persona of Elmo. In effect, he was pretending to be Elmo the player, rather than Elmo the character in the game.

So, my question is, why aren't there any female models in COD4?