smurf

A smurf is not just a second account. The definition turns on hiding skill. Someone playing a new character to learn a different role is on an alt; someone playing a new account so the matchmaker feeds them beginners is smurfing. Concealment is the whole word.

The reasons split, and players judge them differently. Playing at a lower rank to join less experienced friends reads as fair enough. Making a fresh account purely to farm easy wins does not. Smurfs also get read as more likely to taunt the people they are beating, which is part of why the word carries so much heat.

The most honest thing about smurfing is how openly people admit it. Asked directly, players condemn the practice and then say they do it. In published research, 69 percent admitted smurfing while 94 percent thought everyone else was at it. The second number being higher than the first is the whole culture of the word.

The origin is unusually well recorded for slang, and the game's own publisher tells the story. In 1996 two of the strongest Warcraft II players, known as Warp! and Shlonglor, started playing under the names Smurfette and PapaSmurf. Opponents saw unfamiliar names, assumed easy games, and lost. As Shlonglor put it at the time: "We make them think we really suck and then beat them up." By the rule of the day it only counted if the disguise won.

A detail worth getting right: this did not happen on Battle.net. Warcraft II shipped in December 1995 with no internet play, and people reached each other through Kali, a utility that tunnelled PC games over the internet. Battle.net came a year later.

The handles come from the Belgian comic. That is the entire derivation, two players picking two character names, with no metaphor about being small or blue. The banking sense borrowed from the same cartoon about a decade earlier and separately, on a different image: many small identical helpers acting for one person. The two senses are siblings, not parent and child.