“Poggers” — A Twitchy Tale

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The other day, a strange word landed on my screen. “POGGERS,” it read, floating with seeming innocence in the middle of a sentence.

At first, I thought I was witnessing yet another “member-berries” nostalgia moment—someone dragging me back to the 90s and our inexplicable love of stacking tiny circles of cardboard with printed images on them.

“Are Pogs making a comeback?” I wondered.

No, turns out not (sad, I know). So, I dug in.

 

What is the meaning of Poggers?

“Poggers” is a specific emoticon available on Twitch that depicts a surprised-looking Pepe the Frog. The word “poggers” is used to express excitement during a game when something exciting occurs.

 

Nature of Poggers

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Poggers, in its current, Twitch-based incarnation, is a product of the internet.

That means there’s no one official, Oxford English Dictionary definition and no one unified standard of usage.

Ask a dozen people what it means, or how to use it, and it seems you’ll get a dozen answers, each with their own nuance.

So, I’ll be discussing this word based on what I learned and where all the myriad thoughts about the term seem to point.

::best Patrick Bateman impression:: There is an idea of poggers, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real poggers, only an entity, something illusory…

 

Poggers and the Fam

“Poggers” belongs to a sort of family of words that includes “PogChamp” and “MonkaS.” All three of these are derived from BetterTTV emotes used on Twitch.

I… should probably back up and explain what some of those words mean as well. Let’s go in reverse order.

Twitch is a website where people can live stream from their computers. Basically, someone broadcasts their computer screen and a bunch of people watch.

Originally this was for gaming, but its uses have spread to music, writing, and other sorts of general broadcasts.

Still, it’s primarily focused on gaming, and the world of Twitch gaming is where this article is going to focus.

Alongside the streaming video there is always a chatroom, and here is where the emotes come in…

Emotes are basically just emojis on steroids. Whereas emojis are limited, you can download as many emotes as you like to pepper into your chat text to color things up.

They’re tiny images that can often create a sense of personality or community or simply liven up the discussion.

As mentioned, emotes need to be downloaded, and many require purchase or subscription. This brings us to BetterTTV.

BetterTTV (aka Better Twitch TV aka BTTV) offers a bunch of free services when you download them for your browser.

Included in this are a huge library of emotes, including Poggers and the aforementioned MonkaS.

 

Pogger Precursor

::best Freud impression:: To understand zee Pogger, vee must first understand its antecedent in zee dual mother-und-father-figure, zee PogChamp…

Searching for information on PogChamp brought me to the Know Your Meme site and a poorly sourced reference page with a slew of comments remarking that it “needs work.”

Glancing around the internet offered little more help. From Twitter to Quora to Reddit—nothing.

Then, finally I click a blue link: Dictionary.com. Finally! A clear explanation.

PogChamp is the O.G. emote in this story, debuting on Twitch in 2012. It features the face of vlogger/streamer Gootecks making a goofy, surprised face.

The emote is used, or the expression “PogChamp” is said, to express surprise when someone does something particularly awesome in the gaming stream.

The image itself dates back to November 2010 when, during a stream, Gootecks made the face in response to his camera being knocked into.

The term “PogChamp” would arrive almost a year later on October 26 in another video.

In that video, Gootecks offers a MadCatz gaming controller in a promo featuring the old 90s game of Pogs (we’ll return to that later).

At the end, he says, “Pog champions.”

Gooteck’s face spread across the internet, first simply being cut and pasted onto other images—typical meme-style—with “PogChamp” being the term used to refer to it.

This PogChamp meme, for a while, became the face of Team Fortress 2 raffles.

Then, in November 2012, his surprised face got added to Twitch as an emote. Beyond Twitch, PogChamp entered meatspace as an actual spoken expression of excited surprise.

There is some suggestion online that “POG” stands for “Player Of the Game,” and while this may be a term used elsewhere in gaming, I can find no reliable sources that suggest it is directly related to the PogChamp meme.

This seems to be a case of a backronym forming.

 

Poggers on Patrol

Poggers is an emote which became available on September 24, 2017.

It features a surprised Pepe the Frog and is used in place of Gootecks’s PogChamp to express even more excitement. Like PogChamp, “Poggers” is also a spoken or typed expression.

That’s… that’s basically it.

Wait—who’s Pepe the Frog you ask?

Oh dear…

 

Pepe the Frog: from silly zine to troublesome toad

Pepe the Frog has its origins way back in 2005 in a proto-zine called Playtime by a cartoonist named Matt Furie.

The character grew to popularity in the zine Boy’s Club. However, it didn’t become a meme until 2008, when it was uploaded to “/b/” on 4chan.

If you don’t know what “/b/” and 4chan are, consider yourself blessed and investigate no further. I certainly won’t be elaborating here.

All you need to know is that 4chan is an internet forum focused around pictures.

The image of Pepe saying, “Feels Good Man,” shot to memetic notoriety and took on a life of its own.

Wide variations of Pepe were distributed far and wide. For a long, long time, Pepe was just a simple, harmless meme.

Pepe’s last moments in an uncritical spotlight was in 2014.

One year later, during the United States Presidential election, Pepe would be taken over by far-right voices and his innocence would be lost forever.

Since then, Pepe has gone through many transformations, and can still be seen in some less, er, extreme lights, but overall his image—whatever image he once had—has been tarnished.

While I don’t know if “Poggers” itself has any far-right connotations, it may be wise to take the history of Pepe the Frog into account if you wish to use the “Poggers” meme.

 

Poggers in gaming

Most gamers are aware of the term “poggers” as well as the poggers emote.

Most often used on Twitch (thanks to its origins there), “poggers” is a popular and positive term that means that something is cool, exciting, or amazing.

The poggers emote is a parody of the original and now retired emote “pogchamp”, which had depicted Youtuber Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez’s face looking to the right with an expression of shock and excitement. 

Both the word and the emote (and sometimes both) are used on many gaming websites by viewers and gamers alike.

Examples:

 
Poggers is also used as a standalone expression when something exciting or interesting is happening during a game or gameplay.

Viewers may simply type “poggers” into the livechat, meaning that they are engaged and the gameplay is exciting. 

To be even more concise, viewers watching a gaming stream may simply send the “poggers” emote with no accompanying text. 

Poggers can also be used sarcastically, such as when a gamer makes a move that was clearly wrong. This meaning is more synonymous to “amazing”, but imagine it’s spoken in a flat, monotone way, eyebrows raised. 

Examples:

 
There’s no “one use fits all” for poggers since the definition has grown to be pretty broad, so go ahead and try using it when gaming or watching other people game!

Just don’t use it so much irl… that would be pretty cringey.

Though maybe not as cringey as having your face be on an emote known to millions on a popular gaming website and then having it be banned forever by the website’s staff. 

This is what happened to the emote which inspired poggers, “pogchamp”. 

 

What happened to the original pogchamp?

The poggers emote was based on the pogchamp emote of the same expression, so the two are linked pretty intrinsically.

The original pogchamp emote featuring Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez’s face, however, has since been replaced on Twitch for political and public safety reasons following a controversy.

The pogchamp controversy came about after the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol building.

After the riot, Gutierrez asked on Twitter, “Will there be civil unrest for the woman who was executed inside the Capitol today, or will the #MAGAMartyr die in vain?.”

Twitch deemed this tweet to be “encouraging further violence” and made the decision to pull the emote soon after. 

Due to the popularity of the original pogchamp emote, however, Twitch lets users vote on their favorite of multiple similarly styled emotes. 

One emote was crowned champion, KomodoHype, which features a Komodo dragon facing right with a wide shocked and excited face. 

Komodohype still lives on as a popular global Twitch emote to this day, while pogchamp is a relic of the distant past. 

 

Beyond the Frog: some random uses of pogger

 

“Poggers” is the name of a Frogger-like game available on Steam. The game features a rabbit named Bun-Bun Poggers who you have to safely move across the screen to safety.

At least two sources suggest “pogger” can be used in a part of Yorkshire in the UK to refer to a run-down sort of person or thing.

 

Pogger Patrol

“Pogger” also has a military use, coming from the military slang term “POG” which is used to refer to any non-combat military staff.

Nowadays, if you look for what “POG” means in a military context, you’ll be told it comes from “Person Other than Grunt”—but this is a (yet another) backronym.

The origins are a little murky, though most sources point to “pogue” as the original term.

So, where did “pogue” come from? In the early 20th century, the term could refer to a gay man who enjoyed receiving sex from another man.

So, during WWI, “pogue” was used in a derogatory way to refer to other men. That’s one idea of the origin.

A military website suggests that the origin goes back even further and has different connotations entirely.

It is suggested that “pogue” is Gaelic for “kiss” and that Irish-American Navy sailors would use the term disparagingly to refer to their shore-side comrades who would stay at home and get all the kisses.

One more, less well-sited source suggests that it comes from Korean, referring to female genitals.

However, this origin would almost certainly have come long after the Civil War and First World War, so I’m not likely to consider it accurate.

 

POGs: revenge of the 90s

 

The game Pogs, which is also known as “milkcaps,” originated early in the twentieth century in Hawaii.

The term “pog” comes from the brand name of a juice. “POG” juice got its name from an acronym (an actual acronym, for once) referring to its ingredients: Passion fruit, Orange, and Guava.

Using POG-brand caps to play milkcaps was part of the promotion of POG juice.

Even after they switched away from using the milkcaps in their bottles, they continued to produce the caps by themselves for the game.

In the game, each player stacks their pogs face down. The opposing player uses a heavier disc known as a “slammer” to toss at the stack of pogs.

Whichever pogs land face up after the collision, the person who threw the slammer gets to keep. When no more pogs remain in the stacks, the person with the most pogs wins.

This game grew to enormous popularity in the 90s (I should know—I had a metric ton of pogs). One term for referring to those who play pogs? You guessed it: Pogger.

 

”Poggers” in summation

Nowadays, if you say “Poggers,” a small collection of Twitch-streaming gamers will know you mean “That’s awesome!”

Outside of that small circle, you’ll probably be met with weird stares.

Plus, the Pepe connection doesn’t help things much. So, with that in mind, go forth and ::excellent Bill & Ted impression:: “Pogger on!”

 

Frequently asked questions related to “Poggers”

 

Why is MonkaS called MonkaS?

MonkaS is another Pepe the Frog derived Twitch emote. In this one, Pepe is nervous and sweating and is used to indicate that someone is very nervous. The name MonkaS comes from a Twitch user by the name of MonkaSenpai—a subscriber of streamer Nymn—who used that image of Pepe as their personal emote. The emote spread to a bunch more Hearthstone players and on-wards from there. The name “MonkaS” just sorta stuck. Nowadays, emotes that use Pepe often append “Monka” to the name (e.g. in variations such as monkaX, monkaHmm, and monkaShake) instead of “Pepe.”

 

What does UWU mean?

It’s another sort of smiley face. It’s a representation of an anime-style character’s peaceful and happy expression. It shows cuteness and joy.

 

What does F in the chat mean?

It’s a way for people to pay their respects. This can be used either seriously (in the case of a real death) or ironically (in the case of player in-game death).

 

What does LMAO mean?

Cover you kids’ eyes! It means “Laughing My A** Off”!

 

Is poggers a bad word?

Poggers is not a bad word. The meaning of poggers is something good or exciting, so it is rarely used in any negative situation (unless it is used sarcastically). The poggers character Pepe had once been used in right-wing propaganda, though the creator of the emote has since condemned this usage. 

 

What is a pogger?

Pogger refers to “poggers”, a popular emote from BTTV on Twitch. This emote depicts the online character Pepe the Frog with a wide mouth looking surprised and excited. Poggers is a parody of the original emote “pogchamp” which featured Youtuber Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez’s face in the same fashion.