In a time when Fortnite and other popular mobile games are making video gaming more accessible than ever, attempting to enter the gaming community can still be a difficult challenge, particularly because of its members' heavy use of lingo like "nerf" and "OP." The latter is one of gaming's most common terms, but those new to the hobby may often be left wondering: "What does OP mean?"
The video games industry is a massive one, bringing in $34.5 billion U.S. revenue in 2019, according to an Entertainment Software Association report. That report also noted that 75% of U.S. homes have one person who plays video games. Gaming has attracted all kinds of players for some time, but the past decade brought it fully into the mainstream. Mobile gaming was a big part of that, lowering the barriers to entry of traditional game consoles. Mobile games made more than $200 million on Christmas day alone last year, and individual games like Fortnite - which was 2019's top-earning game - can make billions of dollars each year.
All of that community growth means more people running into lingo like OP. Sometimes written as "O.P." or "op," OP is an abbreviation of "overpowered." Dictionary definitions of overpowered say it is only usable as a verb, meaning "to overwhelm, defeat, or overcome," but it's not used that way when referring to video games. Instead, OP is an adjective gamers use to describe a particular character, class, ability, or other element of a game as too powerful. One might see OP used in a sentence such as, "Battlefront 2's Ovissian Gunner is OP." This means the writer thinks the Ovissian Gunner, a heavily armed character class in Star Wars: Battlefront 2, overshadows the other classes in the game with its powerful abilities and makes other classes feel weak or useless.
Because it concerns the balance of power among different parts of a game, OP is most often used in the context of multiplayer titles. Take, for example, Fortnite's B.R.U.T.E. mechs. Added into the game in August 2019, the B.R.U.T.E. vehicles were extremely agile and had very effective weaponry. This made it almost impossible for players without a B.R.U.T.E. to take on players who had obtained one, leading the Fortnite community to call the mechs OP. Gamers sometimes use OP when talking about single-player games, too, if a player character's ability makes the game so easy it's not fun, or if a computer-controlled enemy is so powerful it makes progress impossible. But the term is much more common in discussions of multiplayer games, given that an imbalance of power can make things feel extra unfair and frustrating in competitive scenarios, where skill is usually rewarded over luck.
When something is deemed OP, players will often call for a "nerf," another common gaming term. Regarding multiplayer shooter game Destiny 2, for example, one might see calls for developer Bungie to "nerf Fusion Rifles," one of the game's weapon types. Here, nerf is used as a verb, meaning "to reduce the power of." Additionally, it's important to note one final point of potential confusion: "OP" (or, more commonly, "op") is often used on Reddit and other forums to refer to the "original poster" of the forum post in question, so context clues are needed to distinguish the two usages. With all of this knowledge in mind, navigating multiplayer video gaming communities should become much easier.