What Gives?: The cool kids sound like gamers but the gamers still ain't cool

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with one of my students about how she's adjusting to college. She said it was going well but that her high school experience didn't exactly set her up for success. "Yeah, my freshman and sophomore years really nerfed me" (entirely, completely, one million percent my emphasis added). I said, "it nerfed you?" As in, the term that gamers decry after their favorite character gets a damage reduction?? As in, changing the rage generation mechanic for warriors in World of Warcraft??? As in, decreasing the fire rate of the DSR50 in Black Ops 2???? As in, reworking Mercy's Ultimate in Overwatch so she can't resurrect her entire team at once???? (Sorry, some nerfs I took personally).

I didn't actually ask all those questions, of course. I kept it cool. But it was shocking to hear an eighteen year-old, who, as far as I know, is not an avid gamer, use this word so casually and confidently. And it's far from the first term out of the gamer lexicon I've heard uttered in my classes, the halls, the bathrooms. My students are referring to people on campus as "NPCs" (what I can only imagine is a horrible dig); they're getting late-night McDonald's and calling it a "side quest"; stories about their friends become "lore." One brazen, audacious student replied to one of my comments on his essay about being unable to discern the primary argument with: "skill issue."

These students, by and large, aren't gamers, and none of them are old enough to know the origins of most the terms they throw around so casually – the terms I used fifteen years ago only under the cover of night, door locked, headset on, push-to-talk enabled. I was so worried that my peers – and even some of my friends – would find out about my nerdy extracurriculars that I'd code-switch, talking about sports, girls, an upcoming exam – anything other than the raid I had that night that I didn't buy enough potions for. I got over the embarrassment and insecurities, but it took longer than I'd care to admit.

Bits and pieces of gamer-speak have dribbled into mainstream slang over the years: noob, AFK, rage quit, pwned, GG. But this feels more like a cascade, far more integrated into popular culture than any of those words ever were. I suppose it's a good thing, in some sense: at least gamers can speak freely without having to explain what "aggro" or "griefing" means. But, again, it's not the gamers who are emphatically using them in conversation. It's the trendy, the hip, the "cool" kids (whatever that means). Now, I have plenty of students who are capital-G Gamers, too, and I like them arguably more than the rest (affinity bias, perhaps). However, they're a quieter bunch, and those who do readily talk in class are quicker to tell you about the patch notes of the latest Helldivers 2 update than they are to describe a math assignment as "sweaty."

I'm not condemning this as stolen valor or as a diminishment of the language's true meaning; I mean, it's pretty hard to trivialize words and phrases that are so stupid and inconsequential to begin with. Maybe it's a product of more and more discourse happening online, where gamers have been camping (heh) and crouching (ha) for decades. Maybe it's just a phase and in three months I won't come across a single "F in the chat" outside of my tricenarian Discord servers.

I yearn for the day when I release myself from the pressures of seeming cool in front of teenagers. Alas, today is certainly not that day, and so I'll be joining the nerd-chorus until I inevitably get made fun of for being cringe.