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 Elvish enchantments make your character.
When something boosts your powers or status in a game, you talk about getting “buffed” or acquiring a “buff.” As you might expect, 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 “buff” or piece of leather for polishing.
A leather buff itself got its English name in the 1570s from the term “buffe leather,” which originally described buffalo hide—making in-game talk of having a “good buff” equivalent, etymologically at least, to admiring the excellence of a large cow.
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, in which tens of thousands of users collaborated and competed together in a medieval fantasy world, Ultima Online also boasted an extremely vocal player community ready to voice loud dissent at any perceived injustice.
At one point 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.”15
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” overpowered aspects of a game’s mechanics.
Pleasingly, the nerf circle has also been squared in recent years by the release of several official Nerf-foam branded video games, complete with games console accessories that double as fully functional foam dart guns.
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 band named in its honor.