Rafsan Chowdhury

Assignment: Community Observation Essay

10/4/2020

Discord is “Your place to talk”(Discord.com). Initially made in the year 2015, Discord was made so individuals and their friends can talk and play games together. It started out as a community of small servers that housed mutual friends who already knew each other. But as discord evolved and got more creative, people started building communities where hundreds to thousands of like-minded people can come together to talk, make friends, and deepen their passion. One of those communities that I have been observing is the CCNY Esports Club. It is an undergraduate club founded in Fall 2014 that helps gamers or people getting into gaming connect with one another at City College. Their mission statement is, “We’re an undergraduate club founded in Fall 2014 that seeks to connect players at City College. Our goal is to help players make new friends/teammates, organize in-house games, and promote eSports overall.”(CCNY Esports club) As a club that started at CCNY, due to COVID-19 and the accessibility of discord to most people, the club didn’t have as much of an issue with keeping people connected. I chose to focus on this community because on discord I’m usually only on servers with close friends or mutual friends, but I wanted to explore a bigger server and see if it is just as easy to integrate myself there as a server made up of me and my friends.

As a discord server, what makes this server a community and not just a gaming server would be because the majority of the people here are enrolled at CCNY. Compared to other servers where you can play with random people and communication might not be as smooth, here at the CCNY Esports Discord the people you are conversing with are from CCNY and your relationship can go further than just being friends online. If people are close enough to each other, they can go meet each other in real-life at a club meeting during school time. Just like any other community, you can build relationships with peers here and there are also rules in place so individuals are all treated with respect and have a safe space to express themselves. In the Discord, there is no tolerance for toxicity, racism, bullying, harassment, threats, or anything along these lines within this club. Mild profanity is allowed, limited political conversations, and an expectation for all to exercise common sense. If one breaks these rules, the first time they may be given a warning, but the second time they are banned from the club and will never be affiliated with again. If one has problems with another individual, they can also file a complaint through a google doc file link. 

One issue this community faces would be if there’s a lack of motivated members, especially in the eboard, the club easily becomes mundane. There is only a Fortnite, Rainbow 6 Siege, and League of Legends esports and this is due to the club members being unmotivated to create new esports teams to compete with other colleges. The eboard can only approve a new team’s right to compete, but the members in the discord have the responsibility to create the teams themselves to compete in the first place. The other issue this community faces would be that the school setting and school rules make it difficult to engage members in gaming activities at school. People in the discord are all from different majors and they all have class at different times so that coupled with having club meetings only during club hours makes it difficult for everyone to participate.

The club is run by President: Thao Ly; Vice President: Joseph Djeljevic; Treasurer: David Wang; Secretary: Raynaleen Ricacho and Unofficial Officer: Jonathan Ngo. Originally when the club was initially formed they used Facebook more and discord less, but Facebook is less involved and disorganized, so the president of the club preferred to focus on the discord server only. In order to participate in club activities and be an avid member of the community, you just have to attend club meetings and build your relationships with the people in the discord. As you get close enough to the eboard and the people who run the discord themselves you can apply for roles to help manage the discord/club, and at the end of every Spring semester people run for the President role where the one with the majority votes usually wins. In order to interact in the discord and become an official member, you have to tell a  little bit about yourself by letting the community know your name, school, and what games you like to play in the introduce-yourself text channel. Besides that, in order to get tags on your discord profile for the games you play so others can see what games you two have a common interest in; you have to go to the Welcome-hub chat and react to the game emote below the original message. Having tags is an easy way for people to connect with one another as they can find a common interest and just start conversing. Another great way to introduce yourself would be through club meetings which happens either Thursday or Tuesday 1:30-1:45 pm. Most people just introduce themselves when they enter a call and ask to play and usually if there is space anyone can join in and have some fun. For the most part, people have all been really nice to me and I only join calls if I am bored and want to play a game I am also interested in. Regarding insider language club members usually call each other by their real-life names if they already know each other or by their Discord Alias. People are respectful to one another, even at times of mild profanity. During games, there is a different language people mix in while they are speaking, this so-called language would be your average “gamer-speak”. While in a video game if there was a very exciting play made, people will say, “That was sick”, “Pog”, “Nice!”, etc. At the beginning of a game, some people say “glhf” depending on the game, which stands for “Good luck have fun”(Geekygamerstuff.com). If there was a play to be made by someone and it didn’t quite work out, we say “nt” or “nice try”(Geekygamerspeek.com)  for thanking the person for trying. Lastly, at the end of the game session or when someone leaves the discord call, people usually say “ggs” or “gg”  which stands for good game or good games(Geekygamerstuff.com).

This community is not a marginalized community. This community may be small but it is fortunate to not face the problems marginalized communities face. This community is exclusive to mainly gamers as it is a community built for gamers. Due to this not anyone can join and form relationships with others in the community. Someone can by phone download the discord app, but to get to know someone through a video game and become online friends is not possible unless that person has a console or a computer to play games on. Playing video games with others lets you get to know the person in a different sense because people are sometimes more expressive online and spending time with them allows you to converse about your interests and thus further deepening your friendship.

Work Cited

 

CCNY Esports Club. (n.d.). Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://groups.ccny.cuny.edu/esports/about/

 

Dana. (2020, May 27). Gamer Slang – The Unique Language of Gamers (Gamer Talk). Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://geekygamingstuff.com/gamer-talk-the-unique-language-of-gamers/

 

Nelly. (2020, July 31). Discord is for Your Communities. Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d14464d4c7b

 

Your Place to Talk and Hang Out. (n.d.). Retrieved October 04, 2020, from https://discord.com/

 

Additional Resources: 

Discord Server Link:https://discord.gg/CnK4UvY