“You’ve twinked your character”; “I’m going to log in with my twink”—standard phrases in the realm of online games, where specialized and unlikely-sounding vocabulary abounds.
Twink—which can function variously as noun, verb, and adjective—belongs to an etymologically rich field: words describing gaming power and patronage. It occurs when an experienced player uses the wealth of in-game resources earned by a powerful character to bestow exceptionally good equipment upon one of their lower-level, secondary characters. This points in turn toward a decidedly nontechnical origin for the term: in the identical gay slang for an attractive, effeminate young man in receipt of the patronage of a generous older “sugar daddy.”
Twinks, in this sense, date back to at least the early 1960s—and may, the OED notes, be related to the more innocent idea of something attractive “twinkling” (a word present in English since the fourteenth century, and derived from the Old English twinclian, “to wink or blink”).
A popular alternative etymological theory is that both the gay slang and the gaming slang originate from the American snack cake brand Twinkie, manufactured under that name since the 1930s, whose soft creamy filling and quasi-phallic shape certainly make for some interesting associations. It may, however, simply be the case that Twinkies’ existence reinforced rather than originated the slang terms.
Much as gay slang offers a comprehensive taxonomy of types and tastes, gamer slang also abounds with labels for different playing styles, one of the more colorful of which is the “Munchkin” type: describing a player who seems determined to behave ferociously competitively within a game world or setting intended to be noncompetitive.
The term Munchkin itself is a loan from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and seems first to have been used within gaming discussions during the earliest days of the internet as a dismissive term among older, more experienced, players for those Munchkin-like new players with an intemperate devotion to progress at all costs.
Munchkins may well be found twinking their characters in order to get ahead, or indulging in what’s more formally known as “power-leveling,” meaning to power one’s way through a game’s content as fast as humanly possible. But you can also find gamer labels ranging from “griefers” (who just want to cause exactly what the name suggests) to “carebears” (who just want everything to be safe, friendly, and risk-free).
Among hard-core gamers, this can lead to interestingly titled discussions on player forums. “How many carebears are needed to feed a griefer?,” for example, attracted considerable interest in the content of the space-themed massively multiplayer online game “EVE Online”—although no definitive answer was found.35