Proano 1

Eryn Proaño

Samantha Gonzalez

ENC 1101

8 November 2022

Stay Golden Pony Boy

Everyone has different opinions on video games. Some people think it promotes violence,

some people think specific players are worse than others because they like a specific game, and

others just enjoy them recreationally. Regardless of how you view video games, there’s no

denying that it creates communities. Specifically, video games create discourse communities.

They form for many different reasons, however what stays the same is the general requirements

each community fulfills. A discourse community I’m apart of is in a Discord server called Stay

Golden Pony Boy. This is a group of my personal friends who play a variety of games with one

another. The Stay Golden Pony Boy server is a discourse community because it changes the

member’s lexis, members share the same goal, and shapes the way members interact and hold

relationships with one another.

To begin, there are certain qualifications a group has to meet in order to be considered a

discourse community. Dan Melzer explains discourse communities in his article Understanding

Discourse Communities by saying they have, “1. A broadly agreed upon set of common public

goals 2. Mechanisms of inter communication among members 3. Use of these communication

mechanisms to provide information and feedback 4. One or more genres that help further the

goals of the discourse community 5. A specific lexis (specialized language 6. As threshold level

level of expert members” (qtd. in Swales 24-26). Discourse communities are unique in the way

that they tackle these requirements. In this case, the Stay Golden Pony Boy server is a discord
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server of friends who frequently enjoy playing video games with one another. It was formed in

2021, after the previous server the group was in got too big and the environment became too

hostile. While the server meets all the requirements discourse communities have to make, the

two being dissected are the member’s shared lexis and their shared goal.

To continue, the server members shared a lexis. They used and eventually shared a

similar vocabulary when it came to speaking with each other. These terms could vary between

jokes frequently used by the members or terms used in the games they played. The members

spent so much time together, that their personal jokes and slang eventually became used by the

whole group. Due to the extended exposure time that members have with one another, slang that

one member uses during a game or a call will slowly seep into the other member’s lexis. For

example, the term “rizz” became ever popular after one particular member began using it in

voice chats. After this, more members began using it because he had been saying it for so long.

Another example of this is the term “lock in”. Primarily used when playing a game, members

would say “lock in” when another member wasn’t playing as well as they normally do. The term

is meant to tell them to focus and do better. This term was used so much that members began

using it outside of just gaming, but rather in normal conversation. If someone said something

wrong or incorrect, members would tell them to “lock in” (See Figure 1)..

In addition, the member’s lexis would also be affected by the games they would play with

each other. There are terms for specific actions, some may be individual to a specific game, and

members would use those as they applied in a wide variety of games. For example, the term

“downed” is specifically a term used in the games Fortnite or Warzone. It describes when a

player is not dead, but down and immoble. The members of the server also use this term in FPS

(first-person-shooter) games such as Valorant, CS Go, Overwatch, and others when they kill
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someone in game. Instead of using the term kill, they simply state, “I downed him”. The term

“one tap” is another example of a universal lexis used within the server. When a player,

specifically an opponent, is very damaged and is only one more shot away from being

eliminated, members of the server typically say, “he’s one tap”. These specific terms we used

when playing a game helped us play better. Melzer describes a similar example by staying, “If

someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song was in or how many beats per measure

the strumming pattern required, they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the

community members” (Melzer 105). Instead of explaining exactly what we were doing, using

quick call outs helped us communicate better. Melzer corroborates this statement by using his

own example of a discourse community by saying, “We needed these specialized terms-this

musicians lexis-to make sure we were all playing together effectively” (Melzer 105). Whether it

be personal slang or gaming call outs, these personalized terms help members communicate and

understand each other effectively and efficiently.

Following, the Stay Golden Pony Boy server is a discourse community because its

members have a common goal. There are multiple goals that members share with one another.

The primary goal of the server is to be able to play video games with one another. The server

serves as an easy way for members to see who was online and who wanted to play a specific

game at the time. Each member wanted to be able to play games with their friends. Another goal

was to promote and better the social media platform of the creator of the server. Screen name

Yekram, he streams on Twitch and posts clips of his playing specific games on Youtube and

TikTok. It is agreed upon that whenever Yekram is streaming, members act in a specific way in

order to make his streams more entertaining, but keep it appropriate. Members want to be good

and be shown off in Yekram’s videos, not only to help him get more popular as an influencer,
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but also gain popularity themselves (See Figure 2). The more members participated in videos and

play with one another, the more they understood the goal of the server. In the article, Read the

Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts, one of its three authors, Matthew Chen,

speaks about this by saying, “Recognizing the format of the discussions and learning more about

ecology and scientific genres, I was able to understand the goals of the lab and context behind

their experiments” (Seeley et al. 290). If Chen hadn’t been as involved or learned as much as he

did, he wouldn’t have been able to understand the goals the lab had. The same concept can be

applied to the server.

While the Stay Golden Pony Boy server fits all the requirements a discourse community

has to fulfill, the main ones touched upon were that the members share a common goal and a

lexis. This server and its members' involvement influences and shapes the members the more

they interact with it. Beyond just what was mentioned, members are influenced with how they

interact with others and how they respond to everyday situations. For a discord server, Stay

Golden Pony Boy is a very influential discourse community.

Fig 1. Stay Golden Pony Boy

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https://youtu.be/hF6x9KbOXh0

Fig 2. its 4am… i cant think of a title (2:01)

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Work Cited

Melzer, D. “Understanding Discourse Communities” Writing Spaces, vol. 3, pp. 100-115.

https://writingspaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/melzer-understanding-discourse-

communities-1.pdf

Seeley, S. Xu, K. Chen, M. “Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts”

Writing Spaces, pp. 281-300

Proano, Eryn, Member. Stay Golden Pony Boy. Discord, uploaded by noah

(big#5555), 5 September 2022

Markey, Noah, Editor. its 4am… i cant think of a title. Youtube, uploaded by Yekram,

6 July 2022, https://youtu.be/hF6x9KbOXh0