Buffs and nerfs, for better and worse
On the origin of two gaming terms
I've been a video games fan for most of my life, and grew up within the dialect of the tribe — a space especially rich in terms (and boasts, and taunts) for winning and losing, and for describing precisely how much better or worse various Elven steel accouterments make your character.
When something boosts your powers or status in a game, you talk about getting ‘buffed’ or acquiring a ‘buff’. Much like the ideal of gym-honing a ‘buff’ body, the term derives from the idea of ‘buffing up’ something to improve its appearance. The phrase originated in English in the late nineteenth century, referring to the practice of using a piece of leather called a ‘buff’ for polishing.
A leather ‘buff’ itself got its English name in the 1570s from the term ‘buffe leather’, based on the French word for buffalo hide — making in-game talk of having an ‘awesome buff’ equivalent, etymologically at least, to admiring the excellence of a large cow.
(The word ‘buffalo’ itself, by the way, stretches back from English through French to Latin and, ultimately, ancient Greek: boubalos, an African antelope—quite different from the American bison, which the word was first used in error to describe during the early 17th century).
The idea of buffing up is easy enough to understand outside of any digital context. Far more esoteric, though, is the term used to describe its opposite: having one’s powers reduced, or being ‘nerfed’.
A pleasantly onomatopoeic word — with hints of both ‘nerd’ and ‘worse’ — nerf is also a young term, tracing its roots to the cult 1997 game Ultima Online. One of the first true massively multiplayer online games, Ultima Online also boasted an extremely vocal player community ready to voice loud dissent at any perceived injustice.
Early in the game’s history, its designer, Raph Koster, hosted an online chat to discuss the relative ineffectiveness of weapons like swords in the game as compared to bows or magical spells. Koster promised he would look into the problem of what he called ‘nerf swords’ — a tongue-in-cheek reference to a popular brand of toy foam sword, whose name came from the acronym ‘Non-Expanding Recreational Foam’.
Unknowingly, Koster had gifted the gaming world a key term — and one that’s now enshrined in its professional vocabulary, with game designers and companies regularly debating how to ‘nerf’ over-powered aspects of a game’s mechanics. It’s a serious business, with balanced mechanics being the holy grail of lasting game design; an aspiration that, in the ever-evolving world of MMOs, demands the steady nerfing of anything that gives anyone an especially sharp competitive edge.
Meanwhile, on an almost-certainly unrelated note, the term ‘nerf’ also refers in George Lucas’s Star Wars universe to a species of alien herbivorous mammal, with ‘nerf herder’ serving as a fond insult during the course of The Empire Strikes Back — a pop cultural pedigree august enough to have had at least one pop punk band named in its honour.
(And for those interested in further etymological explorations, my book Netymology has a rich supply.)
