this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Pog/poggers. I’m old but usually up on things as a long-time knight-of-new but this term slipped by me years ago and I never caught its meaning.
Twitch is a popular live stream platform, on it users can post emotes which have names. One of the oldest and most popular emotes is pogchamp, it used to be the face of a streamer who made the expression after winning a game of pog but he got banned for some controversial statements (typical right wing covid denial, jan6th apologia) and the emote was replaced with a lizard making a similar face. This has slowly bled into the mainstream just as the word pog or poggers.
The facial expression sums up it's meaning, but it's basically one of shocked happiness, you would use it if a streamer does something rare/lucky/skillful. Luke sky-walker turning off his targeting computer but still destroying the deathstar is poggers. Getting an A on a multiple choice test despite guessing every answer is poggers.
Is it really pogs that started this and not "Play Of the Game"?
Yes I'm pretty sure. Here is the video where the face for the :pogchamp: emote used on twitch comes from (if your confused it's an outtake vid from Here). That emote was the one of the most popular emotes on twitch for a very long time, people would go onto other platforms and just type :pogchamp: and other twitch users would know what they meant. Eventually it was shortened to just pogchamp and then just pog. Here's the oldest example of pogchamp I can find from 2013 when it first started migrating to reddit (video came out in 2011 and became a platform wide emote on twitch in 2012).
Also FWIW I would abbreviate Play of the Game to PotG.
Hmm, so I learned of pog in 2016 when my friends were into Overwatch, and pog was definitely used as an acronym from Play Of the Game (POTG is very clunky to say).
However, the PogChamp usage is from 2011, so the play of the game usage is either coincidental or an intentional decision on the part of Blizzard/Activision.
Most importantly, the POG in PogChamp does actually refer to the beverage disks. Weirdly enough, they were just a prop in an awkwardly acted ad for a gaming peripheral by a professional Street Fighter player/streamer. The actual usage of PogChamp probably started on 4Chan before appearing on Twitch, after which it spread.
I learnt PotG from Overwatch lol. I pronounce it "p-tog". It's what the fandom wiki for Overwatch calls it, it's what reddit calls it (I couldn't find even one example of pog being used that way from /r/overwatch, but I can see literally thousands of examples of PotG used that way) and what news organizations called it.
You can't find a single example from r/Overwatch? You're not looking very hard then:
"Jump scare at the end of POG" "Supports almost never get POG, now we don't even get a card at the end of the match." "First POG is match POG" "We want to talk after the PoG" "This guy's whole team left after the first round so we gave him POG..." "Behind every Rein Pog is a support going through a rollercoaster of emotions" "I remember when PoG was tweaked for assist points and every pog was Mercy rezzing two people and dying." "My friends and I have always called it POG. Not sure why but its what we do. I guess thats where it came from"
In fact, the large majority of the use of "pog" refers to Play Of Game and not hype. I did notice that this usage is more common in the last 4 years, while pogchamp is mostly used 4-7 years ago. The earliest upvoted usage of POG I can find there is "Taking Trobjorn and Bastion POG into a new dimension." from 8 years ago though, so it was used contemporaneously with PogChamp.
POTG is definitely much more popular there, but saying the POG usage doesn't exists is just wrong.
Also, news organizations have a horrendous record with slang, that's terrible evidence. Especially when your source is a 404.
Besides, I can get spurious souces too (and they work!):
"POG" an overused term on twitch that means "Play of Game" Woah, that was pog. by SSR Rules September 23, 2020
It’s an expression of shock and excitement. It comes from a specific image that became a Twitch emote of the same name. If you look up “pog” or “pogchamp”, you should find the image. The face pretty much speaks for itself. It’s one of the staples of Twitch chat culture
The term has also evolved in everyday speech as essentially being equivalent to “sick” or “dope”
I always thought pog was the thing in the 90's where you would have to flip them and whatever flipped you got to keep.
That's true, but I believe in this case it's a double meaning referencing a twitch streamer playing that game Pog, and the acronym "Play Of [the] Game".
It's like when gg became I surrender or it's gg, it's lost.
POG = Play of the Game
It was used by people in the chat when watching video game streamers pull off an impressive play.
It just kind of morphed out of that to mean something awesome happened.