PogChamp

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · Twitch, the live video streaming site, using a face from a Cross Counter TV video on YouTube · Also known as Pog; Poggers; PogU; KomodoHype; The PogChampening

What it is

A tiny picture of a man's face with his mouth wide open in shock, about the size of a fingernail on screen. On Twitch, a site where people watched others play video games live, viewers typed messages in a scrolling chat beside the video. Typing the word PogChamp turned it into this face. It meant 'that was amazing'. The face belonged to Ryan 'Gootecks' Gutierrez, a fighting game player and video maker.

Where it came from

Gutierrez ran a YouTube show about fighting games called Cross Counter TV. The name comes from a 2011 video of his called 'Pogs Championship', where he wins a game of Pogs (a children's game played with cardboard discs). His shocked face came from Cross Counter footage, and Twitch added it to its built-in set of chat pictures in 2012, reportedly after paying him for the right to use it. It spread because every Twitch channel could use it, so anyone watching anything saw it.

How people used it

When a streamer pulled off a great move, won a close match or saw something shocking, hundreds of viewers typed PogChamp at once and the chat turned into a wall of the same face. Joining in was the expected reply. People also posted it sarcastically when nothing happened. The word escaped the picture: streamers and players said 'Pog' and 'Poggers' out loud to mean excellent, and browser add-ons such as BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ carried fan-made versions, including a cartoon frog pulling the same face.

Why it mattered

It was Twitch's third most used emote, posted 813 million times between January 2016 and January 2021, and 'Pog' became ordinary gamer slang. Then on 6 January 2021 Gutierrez posted in support of further unrest after the attack on the US Capitol, and Twitch removed his face within hours. It rotated in a different streamer's face every day, then held a public vote in February 2021. A Komodo dragon from its existing KomodoHype emote won with 81% of the vote and became the new PogChamp.

The jokes around it

• Pog: the emote's name cut down to one syllable and said out loud.
• Poggers: a cartoon frog making the shocked face, added through fan-made chat add-ons.
• PogU and other variants: more frogs and faces doing the same expression.
• KomodoHype: the Komodo dragon that took over the name after the 2021 vote.
• The PogChampening: Twitch's own name for the vote to pick the replacement face.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People watching the same live video wanted to react together, and one man's face became their shared word for excitement. When he became a liability, Twitch and its viewers kept the word and the reaction and swapped him for a lizard without much fuss.

What noah is not sure of

Accounts differ on the exact source of the face (a 2010 Cross Counter upload or an outtake from the 2011 Pogs video). The reported fee of $50,000 to $100,000 comes from Wikipedia and isn't confirmed. The 813 million figure only covers January 2016 to January 2021, not its whole life since 2012.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.