Dungeons & Dragons: A Discourse Community “Everyone ready? While roaming through the forest on a long summer's night, the party stumbles across a pack of rabid ghouls which grumbles and growl at the very sight of you. All must roll initiative and get ready to fight. Critical hit.” Although the conversation above may not make much sense to the common person, a regular player of the tabletop game “Dungeons & Dragons” would be able to comprehend and respond accordingly to that exact situation. I surely believe that the game, (commonly shortened to “D&D”) is an excellent example of a discourse community. For background purposes, this is a discourse community that I am directly involved with. My interest for the game sprouted from a young age. …show more content…
The main goal of the community, as well as any other tabletop community, is to enjoy yourself and create fictional adventures with the other players around you. Secondary goals may include: improving your writing and overall confidence, developing three-dimensional characters, as well as creating lasting friendships with the others playing the game with you. As the game plays out, players commonly find themselves expressing their thoughts on these goals and actively pursuing them. Whether or not the goals are completed is based on the behavior of individual players, but everyone has these goals in mind when they start playing. In realizing these goals, communication is also very important to this community. Without speaking to each other or sending messages back and forth, the game would be made impossible. The game consists of a storyteller (known as the Dungeon Master,) describing a scene to two to six other players. The players then describe their actions in the scene and the cycle rolls on. Without communication, none of that would be made …show more content…
Each player must return back to the game for the adventure to continue. Without them, the game just wouldn’t be the same. Each player provides information to the Dungeon Master, receives feedback on that information to create an ongoing story. This is a very simplified model of how the game works, but overall it all boils down to the exchange of knowledge from player to player. With proper communication and participation of every member in the community, each game can consist of many elements which all revolve around the communities genres. Genres include, but are not limited to: Tabletop gaming, speech, world and character creation, and advanced storytelling between players. Sub-genres of the community include, but are not limited to: Voice acting, the creation of art for the game, map-making, and research of the different fantasy aspects in the game. Although most of the genres are fairly simple, they all make a big impact on creating a unique and exciting story for players of all ages to enjoy. Members of the community all use these genres to communicate ideas and present personalized experiences in the story for everyone to
A discourse community has mechanisms of communication amongst their members. A discourse community uses its sharing mechanisms mainly to provide information and feedback. A discourse community applies and holds one or more genres in the communicative progress of its goals. In addition to holding genres, a discourse community has to obtain some specific lexis. Lexis is the total stock of words in a language. A discourse community has a level of members with a proper degree of appropriate content and discoursal expertise, ranging from a novice to an expert. I will further explain each characteristic and how it relates to the dance
Joining a discourse community is when you all share a common like or belief. Joining a discourse community can sometimes be a challenge. Rather you’re new at it or been participating in something for a very long time. Every discourse community is different and can be operated differently and by different type of people. They say drill team and dancing is easy and doesn’t take a lot of hard work like in other sports so in this paper I will be sharing with you all my journey of joining drill team/dance team and appealing ethos, logos and pathos.
The fourth characteristic states, “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.” (221). Swales defines genre as different types of communication, not just verbal, but also written. Genres of a discourse community could be group messages, online posts, emails, notes, and more. Each discourse community is going to have different, specific genres they
A discourse community has an agreed set of common public goals. It is a group of individuals that have a specific way of interacting and communicating with one another. It is also used as a means to maintain and extend a group’s knowledge, as well as initiate new members into the group. Specific kinds of languages are used as a form of social behavior. Such discourse communities vary in size, purpose and importance.
The gaming discourse community is a most interesting group of people. Its members come from all ages and walks of life who are drawn to this community for many reasons. Typically, these the members of this discourse community fall in the age range of early teens to late thirties. They come from unique backgrounds, experiences, and nationalities. This diversity brings a life and culture to this community that is unlike any other.
To examine various discourses, it is crucial that the idea of discourse and the way in which discourses operate is clear. A discourse is a language, or more precisely, a way of representation and expression. These "ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic produce meaningful knowledge about the subject" (Hall 205). Therefore, the importance of discourses lies in this "meaningful knowledge," which reflects a group’s ideolo...
“A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory
There were several new concepts that were introduced to me this semester including the topic of genre. I found out that it was more than a classificatory tool. According to Bawarshi and Reiff, genre has changed into “a shaper of texts, meanings, and social actions”. In other words, genres are used to change and influence social interactions and to produce meaning-
When joining a discourse community, it is important that one learns how those in the group use effective ways of communicating. In most discourse communities, they share a distinct genre or way of writing. Members are usually held to certain standards regarding their contribution to the group. Those in the community provide vital feedback and information that is ultimately responsible for the growth of the group. In the following paper, I will discuss the discourse community of “UTEP Blast.”
When a person is asked what he or she knows about discourse community, they might not have any idea of what that means. However, they are probably involved in more than one discourse community. Discourse community in a general definition means that a number of people who have the same interests, values, concerns, or goals. The discourse community term spanned to include everything from religions and morals to sports and games. In all these various kinds of discourse communities, there are some common fundamental forms of communication that participate in keeping these groups related like written regulations, requirements, instructions, and schedules. Being a
Swales depicts that a discourse community must follow six characteristics in order to properly be labeled as a discourse community. These characteristics are: “agreed set of common public goal, mechanisms of intercommunication among members, uses its mechanisms to provide information and feedback, utilizes and possesses one or more genres, acquired some specific lexis, and has threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” (Swales, 2010, 471-473). Porter, on the other hand, gives us a shorter definition that combines Swales’ characteristics: “A "discourse community" is a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated” (2010, p. 38-39). Such things that would fall under a discourse community would be certain clubs like national honor society, thespian club or 4H club. Others could be sport based groups such as basketball, football or baseball.
As put by Jen Waak in regarding the human need for community, “By surrounding yourself with others working toward a similar goal, you’ll get...yourself a bit further than you would have done on your own,” (Waak). By being able to see and participate in these different communities centered around different objectives, the goal becomes easier to achieve and bonds the group into something more through trying to reach it. This new unit is called a discourse community and is defined by John Swales as containing six specific characteristics: having a common goal, showing intercommunication and using lexis, having participation within the group, being defined by genres of texts, and having members with areas of expertise for the community. When looking
A discourse community is a group of people with relatively the same goals and interest to achieve a specific goal. Discourse communities gain there members by qualification, shared objectives, training, or persuading others to join their discourse community. In order for a group to be a discourse community, they must have their own languages, text, rules, and ethics that will make the discourse community run more efficiently. They will also have a form of intercommunication among the group to keep everyone involved or informed with upcoming events or just important news. Discourse communities will have a type of mechanism to provide feedback to help improve the group. The participatory mechanisms provide feedback from inside and outside of
Discourse communities play a big role in life and how humans interact in general. A discourse community refers to a group of people who have language, life patterns, culture, and communication in common with each other. The idea of a discourse community has also been used to bring people of different orientations together, like family members, students, or committees. All of these types of people might have different standards of living, like their level of income, education, and work abilities. Discourse community can also refer to a speech community, because the main feature of a discourse community is communication. A discourse community can include groups of different regional areas that may or may not share norms and living patterns
When you think of the term ‘roleplaying’ many things might come to mind: The man in his early 30’s still living in his parent’s basement – licking the nacho cheese crumbs from his fingers whilst playing World of Warcraft. The girl desperately trying to keep her fingers out of harm’s way as she frantically tries to finish her costume before the big LARP event at noon. The group of close friends sitting down after weeks of planning to finally start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Or even something less “kosher.” But what you don’t quite hear mentioned is the subject of prose roleplay. It is my intention to fill in that void by sifting through the sand -brushing off misnomers and stereotypes – to reveal the hidden jewel that is prose roleplay.