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So last night, I saw a comic about savescumming. It just used the word savescumming with no context, and of course I know what that means, but as I thought about the word, I realized how weird it is. And I began to wonder about the etymology.

The etymology of slang is something that interests me intensely. Like, take “The Bee’s Knees”. Why the hell is something good the knees of a bee? Well, with some mild research, you can find out it was originally a term that meant “something that does not exist”, but was reworked in the roaring 20s. The youth of the day invented nonsense language to refer to things as “the tops”, like “the cat’s pajamas”, and so they utilized “The Bee’s Knees” and it was completely recontextualized, the original meaning lost.

That’s fun! But what about OTHER terms that we take for granted every day? So I kinda wanted to research some random gaming and internet terms and determine their origins. Keep in mind, I am not a trained linguist or researcher. I took an intro class on linguistics in college. So that means I know more than most people, tbf, but if I make some mistake, lemme know. A lot of this is Old Internet stuff that’s basically lost to time.

Savescum

I think it’s important to start with the term that brought me to the dance. Save scumming is the act of reloading a save over and over until you get the preferred outcome. The term has been in use for a long time. If you do a cursory glance, you’ll find forum mentions of it dating back to the early 2000s over on forums and blogs. But those posts, like the one shown from a forum about Battle for Wesnoth, use the term like it’s been in use for a while, so that can’t be the origin.

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If we troll back through usenet, we find posts from the 90s using the term, too. But most of these posts are focused around one genre in particular: roguelikes. And I don’t mean our modern interpretation, these are the hardcore kinda fucked up roguelikes of yesteryear. That’s all well and good, but where did the term itself FULLY come from?

Well, if we dig deeper into the past, the term “savescum” kind of disappears around the mid 90s. But another term is in constant use. “scumming”, just in general. Scumming! Here’s a usenet post from late 1993 that uses this term, talking about Angband.

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Scumming NOT in a videogame context is like, dragging scum off the top of something, getting a tiny bit of something. It’s probably a modified form of skimming, changed by the more derogatory use of the word “scum”. When early gamers got it though, it meant very similar things. dragging the tiniest amount of something off the top for the littlest effort. Basically, collecting easy rewards for unchallenging effort.

In that example up there, “stairscumming” was going up and down stairs until what you want properly spawns. Safe, easy, kind of scummy. A very similar term is “cheese”, actually. It’s basically the same thing. Except where-as cheese is still used for things like this, scum became known for only one thing. No one would call this “scumming” today. At some point, the word shifted with its most commonly used form, that of saving and reloading over and over.

Twink

This one is really funny to me, as a queer woman who’s very much in LGBT areas. This word has a few different meanings, and if you’re in the same spaces I am, the gaming term is NOT the first one to come to mind. But either way, this IS a term that means something in videogames.

“Twinking” is the act of taking a lower level character and decking them out with the absolute best gear. This is usually used in MMORPGs. For example, in Warcraft, you could make a level 39 twink with all the best gear for the late 30s, and then pit them against lower level (and much less experiences) players in PVP and absolutely beat the shit out of them.

This term is very similar to “smurfing”, and has basically been replaced by smurfing entirely. People don’t immediately know what you mean if you say you’re twinking unless you’re an old WoW head. Or in a gay bar.

But where did the term even come from? I mean, the obvious answer would be the gay slang. If you read my blog, I probably do not need to tell you what a twink is. But an older meaning of twink was a younger and inexperienced person, lavishly fashionable thanks to the benefits of an experienced sugar daddy. This would parallel the MMO meaning of the word, where you are LITERALLY decking out a more inexperienced character with lavish fashions and items.

But this term doesn’t come from WoW. Hell, it was in the Ultima Online Renaissance playguide in the glossary of terms, and that came out in 2000. And that’s also WAY too late to be the word’s origin, because it was used in MUDs back in the 80s in a similar way, though more for powerleveling and metagaming.

Though it seems like the most direct origin of this word, the link between gay bars and videogames (other than me), is tabletop gaming. There are theories that in early role-playing games, it was called “twinking” because high level equipment would be described as “twinkling”. This feels like a historical retcon to me, and is kinda dumb, but hey, it could be possible. I think it’s about gay guys.

Smurfing

Hey, we did Twink, why not its brother?

Smurfing is kind of similar to twinking, though while twinking is all about decking yourself out to beat up noobs, smurfing is about hiding your identity… and beating up noobs. In a modern example, if an emerald player in League makes a new account to play with his newer friends so they don’t just get stomped by other emerald players, that’d be smurfing. Or he could just do it by himself to beat up players and feel better about himself, cause it’s League and everyone is kinda mean, but let’s go with the more positive example.

Obviously the term comes from the Smurfs, the little blue gnome creatures that are for some reason still getting media to this day. But why THEM?

So this is a term that is directly related to competitive online games. It can’t really exist back in the 80s with useboards again, right? Well no, actually, it doesn’t. We, for once, know the exact reason why it’s called smurfing. It is also, once again, related to Blizzard.

Back in 1996, there was a person known online as Shlonglor. He hosted a website all about Warcraft 2 at the time and was very well known in the community. This also made it impossible for him to get a game together, because if he was playing online and someone saw the name “Shlonglor”, they’d either grovel or dip, cause what’s the point, they’ll just get stomped.

So he and his roommate, Warp!, made up false names no one would recognize and beat up newer playe- I mean, actually get a game going! The names they chose were “Papa Smurf” and “Smurfette”. Hence the current name of “smurfing”. Obviously when two people go around beating the shit out of every player they see, with names like THAT, they get attention.

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The term caught on pretty quick. It’s even on the official warcraft 2 glossary online. Shlonglor went on to be hired by Blizzard and become their webmaster, which probably means he’s done some horrifying shit that we just don’t know about yet.