The Study
Drinking games can be classified according to their own features and these games tend to fall into the following six categories: motor skills, verbal skills, gambling games, media games, team games, and consumption games. The student body of Notre Dame relies heavily on teams games with a few motor skills games sprinkled in. Like I stated on my title page the main objectives that I have found to facilitate drinking games are intoxicating oneself, intoxicating others, to meet new people and for the competition. To find these objectives I conducted an online survey via facebook book that looked like the following bellow.
If you could respond to this question in 50 words or less it would be really helpful for a website project i have due in a couple of weeks on drinking games on college campuses.
The Question is:
Why play drinking games when you go out on the weekend?
This was sent out to roughly 50 different students, 25 male and 25 female, and surprisingly the responses were very consistent between the males and females. Most of the responses came back to me like this:
"They are a more fun way to socialize when you drink, and sometimes you legitimately play for the competition."
"Perhaps some people are shy and this gets them socializing with other people that are also drinking. It creates a common ground."
After doing the survey I followed it up by reading a review essay written by Brian Borsari a Professor at Brown University for alcohol and addiction studies. His writings reinforced my findings and made a common denominator for my study.There was a common denominator of playing the games for the sole purpose of winning, as well as, being able to socialize without it being awkward. Some people said, "It makes it easy to yell and make fun of people that normally wouldn't be acceptable. Then from that it becomes a conversation starter." In the review text Borsari echos these findings. Borsari states, "Many participants view drinking games as a way to facilitate romantic interactions , and sexual encounters are often associated with drinking game participation." We can easily see that there are games being played on top of the original game at hand. Surveys have identified motives of typical drinking game participants. It was reported that both social lubrication and getting drunk were motives for playing drinking games. More recently, in a survey of over 1200 incoming freshmen, Borsari et al. (2003) found that over half reported getting drunk and socialization as their motives to play drinking games, while 21% of the sample reported playing drinking games to control others or to get someone else drunk.Female students are a target group for the 21% of people that want others to drink in order to spark up romantic relationships through the drinking games.
In the book Flow by author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chapter 8 has a really interesting idea about controlling one's consciousness. People are always worrying about life, health, investments, family, homework, and the future, so we as humans turn to things that focus this consciousness, like TV. The TV brings a certain amount of order to consciousness because of the predictable plot, familiar characters and commercials. The same thing can be said about drinking games at a party. These games are not only enjoyable, but also a necessity to create order for people. A specific set of rules is one of the attractions of drinking games in social situations. Such rules allow a group of players to focus on the game, and not on more personal topics. In addition, students report the games often an enjoyable atmosphere. As players become intoxicated, personal barriers tend to be reduced, facilitating a sense of friendship that would normally not be there. In team games, novices can become apart of a team of more experienced players, further facilitating a social connection. Also, if players should want to continue to interact with one another after the game is over, the drinking game results provide them with a common topic to discuss.
I was pretty happy with the results from my small survey, personal interviews, personal observation, and further readings. Even though these findings and ideas were taken over a very short period of time I believe it is very telling of the true meaning of drinking off campus. These drinking games form a comfort level at parties that would be missing without them, it smooths out awkward situations and turns them into enjoyable ones. Everyone wants to fit in, or be the "man" at parties and what better than the arena or drinking games to be able to do this.
If you could respond to this question in 50 words or less it would be really helpful for a website project i have due in a couple of weeks on drinking games on college campuses.
The Question is:
Why play drinking games when you go out on the weekend?
This was sent out to roughly 50 different students, 25 male and 25 female, and surprisingly the responses were very consistent between the males and females. Most of the responses came back to me like this:
"They are a more fun way to socialize when you drink, and sometimes you legitimately play for the competition."
"Perhaps some people are shy and this gets them socializing with other people that are also drinking. It creates a common ground."
After doing the survey I followed it up by reading a review essay written by Brian Borsari a Professor at Brown University for alcohol and addiction studies. His writings reinforced my findings and made a common denominator for my study.There was a common denominator of playing the games for the sole purpose of winning, as well as, being able to socialize without it being awkward. Some people said, "It makes it easy to yell and make fun of people that normally wouldn't be acceptable. Then from that it becomes a conversation starter." In the review text Borsari echos these findings. Borsari states, "Many participants view drinking games as a way to facilitate romantic interactions , and sexual encounters are often associated with drinking game participation." We can easily see that there are games being played on top of the original game at hand. Surveys have identified motives of typical drinking game participants. It was reported that both social lubrication and getting drunk were motives for playing drinking games. More recently, in a survey of over 1200 incoming freshmen, Borsari et al. (2003) found that over half reported getting drunk and socialization as their motives to play drinking games, while 21% of the sample reported playing drinking games to control others or to get someone else drunk.Female students are a target group for the 21% of people that want others to drink in order to spark up romantic relationships through the drinking games.
In the book Flow by author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chapter 8 has a really interesting idea about controlling one's consciousness. People are always worrying about life, health, investments, family, homework, and the future, so we as humans turn to things that focus this consciousness, like TV. The TV brings a certain amount of order to consciousness because of the predictable plot, familiar characters and commercials. The same thing can be said about drinking games at a party. These games are not only enjoyable, but also a necessity to create order for people. A specific set of rules is one of the attractions of drinking games in social situations. Such rules allow a group of players to focus on the game, and not on more personal topics. In addition, students report the games often an enjoyable atmosphere. As players become intoxicated, personal barriers tend to be reduced, facilitating a sense of friendship that would normally not be there. In team games, novices can become apart of a team of more experienced players, further facilitating a social connection. Also, if players should want to continue to interact with one another after the game is over, the drinking game results provide them with a common topic to discuss.
I was pretty happy with the results from my small survey, personal interviews, personal observation, and further readings. Even though these findings and ideas were taken over a very short period of time I believe it is very telling of the true meaning of drinking off campus. These drinking games form a comfort level at parties that would be missing without them, it smooths out awkward situations and turns them into enjoyable ones. Everyone wants to fit in, or be the "man" at parties and what better than the arena or drinking games to be able to do this.
