Running head: DISCOURSE COMMUNITY ETHANOGRAPHY

Discourse community ethnography

Ivan Mota-Aguilar
University of Texas at El Paso

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Introduction
The University of Texas at El Paso is filled with clubs and organizations, UTEP has over
200 of them. For this discourse community ethnography, I decided to analyze the Miners League
Gaming Organization. The Miners League Gamers Organization or MLGO, this organization of
the University of Texas at El Paso has as purpose to provide a positive and safe space for people
with an interest in competitive gaming. The organization is focused mainly in major league video
games such as DOTA 2 and League of Legends, both games 5 vs 5 that require communication
between the players, skill, and team play. The purpose of the organization is to create
connections and opportunities for local, national and worldwide friendly competition. I decided
to do my discourse community ethnography in this organization because I am highly interested
in the electronic sports field, I am a video games player, and because I would like to belong to
this organization in the future. I will analyze this organizations attending to the organization as a
viewer to ask questions and then using John Swales six different characteristics I will identify if
MLGO is a discourse community.
Literature review
For this assignment I will be using two sources to analyze what a discourse community is
and the characteristics that make one. The first source will be John Swales. The Concept of
Discourse Community. In this article Swales define a discourse community using six different
characteristics that each discourse community must have in order to be considered one. Swales
six characteristics include: A discourse community must have a common goal or a set of
objectives, has a mechanism of communication between the people inside of the discourse
community, has its own mechanisms to supply responses and feedback among their members,
uses several different genres, possesses its own lexis, and possesses a hierarchy.

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The second source that I will be using is James E. Porter Intertextuality and the
Discourse Community. This article in the other hand, introduces the concept of what is
intertextuality which is the idea that all writing has traces and ideas from other past text, and how
it is incorporated to the discourse community. According to Porter is the principle that all
writing and speech-indeed, all signs-arise from a single network. (Porter, 1986, p. 396).
Methods
For this assignment I chose the Miners League Gamers Organization. First, I found the
organization in the UTEP webpage Minetracker where I found most of the information about
the organization such as, the time and place of the meetings and the contact information of the
leader of the organization, Brenda Ruiz Lopez. I got in contact with her and I asked her if I could
attend to one of the meetings/trainings to observe and ask questions about the organization. I
attended the first meeting of the semester and I asked questions to both, the leader of the
organization and to some of the newest members. I was really amazed with the organization of
the club, it was divided into two competitive games and between the two games it was divided in
teams depending on the level of skill of the members. The two games were league of legends and
DOTA 2, so it was really easy to me to get involve into the conversations between the groups
because I play both games. Every member of the group explained me what the organization was
about and why they decided to join.
Discussion
As mentioned. the Miners League Gamers Organization is a student organization in
UTEP and after analyzing the organization, asking questions to members of the organization and

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using Swales six characteristics of a discourse community I was able to determine if this
organization falls into the category of discourse community.
1- A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals (Swales,
1990, p.472). The miners league gaming organizations goal or objective is to provide a positive
and safe space to all of the students that are interested in the competitive gaming and to the ones
that only want to have a good time with friends talking and playing video games. Also, MLGO
has the goal to create connections between the group members and important E-Sports teams to
generate opportunities for the members to become professional gaming athletes in a local,
national and worldwide level.
2- A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
(Swales, 1990, p. 472). The miners league gaming organization use a wide variety of ways to
communicate between members, when they are training inside of the game they use the software
TeamSpeak. TeamSpeak is proprietary voice-over-internet Protocol that allows computer users to
speak on a chat channel with other users, much like a telephone conference call. When the
members are not training or in a meeting they use the MLGOs Facebook page to communicate
between each other or to send an important message about the important dates or if the date of a
meeting have been change.
3- A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide
information and feedback (Swales, 1990, p. 472). The skill a player has in a competitive video
game always have room for improvement and in an organization that is mainly focus in
competitive video games, the members are always trying to be better a whichever game they are
playing, that is why after every training game each team gets together in the room tables and they

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give feedback to each other about the mistakes they made in the game and what they can do to
improve, they called the analysis tables.
4- A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the
communicative furtherance of its aims. (Swales, 1990, p. 472). The genres that this organization
use are posters to spread the organization through campus and provide students with the location
and time of the meetings. Also, social media (Facebook page) where they do most of their
announcements about events that they will be hosting and the tournaments they will be playing
in.
5- A discourse community had acquired some specific lexis. (Swales, 1990, p. 473).
Every discourse community has its own specific vocabulary and the Miners League Gaming
Organization is not the exception. The lexis that they use is the terms that are used inside of the
game to describe specific situations. For example, Counter-Ganking referring to the situation
when one of the players of the team is coming to help you when two of the enemies are attacking
you, Flanking referring to when you take advantage of cover to come up on the enemys blind
spot to take them out. The organization uses a lot of this terms during the trainings and some of
them when they are not in-game such as, ELO that is the mathematical rating system for a
player's relative skill level or how good or bad is at something.
6- A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree or
relevant content and discourse expertise (Swales, 1990, p.473). In order to be consider a
discourse community the organization must have a hierarchy between the members. In The
Miners League Gaming organization not every member has the same skill in every video game,
there are players that just started playing and the ones that have played for a long time. That is
why the organization divides the players by the skill level into different team for example, the

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organization has 2 teams for players that have a medium skill level, and only have 1 team for the
high skill level players. The hierarchy of the organization is the leader of the organization first,
the diamond team, gold team, and at the bottom the silver team.
Conclusion
Overall, the Miners League Gaming Organization is a really good organization in UTEP,
everyone is very supportive and everyone share the same love for competitive video games. The
members of MLGO are always working towards improving the organization and the way they
play, most of the members never miss any meeting, they help each other giving feedback to each
other, and communicating effectively. In conclusion, the MLGO is consider a discourse
community because it fulfils the six different characteristics that Swales give to be consider a
discourse community.

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References
Porter, J. (1986). Intertextuality and the discourse community. In E. Wardle & D. Downs (Eds.),
Writing about writing: A college reader (p. 395-405). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.
Swales, J. (1990). The concept of discourse community. In E. Wardle & D. Downs (Eds.),
Writing about writing: A college reader (p. 212-227). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.