2The room is crowded, but the people are more or less strangers. Alcohol is plentiful, but that time-honored social lubricant alone isn’t quite doing the trick. Boredom sets in. The stage is set for a drinking game.
The compulsory nature of alcohol consumption in drinking games can make it difficult for players to control the amount they drink, which often leads to higher levels of intoxication than planned, 21-year-old advertising major Patricia Miller said.
“The focus is on the drinking, and not on what’s going around you,” Miller said.
“People just drink what the game tells them to, even if they’re already falling-down drunk.”
A study by Brian Borsari from The Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University identifies another key reason why drinking games get participants drunker than they would otherwise be.
“Once players start consuming alcohol, their cognitive and motor processes are affected; as a result, they start making mistakes repeatedly, and in turn drink more and more alcohol,” Borsari said. “The longer the game is played, players become more intoxicated, decreasing their skills. This process can result in players consuming larger amounts of alcohol than intended.”
Yet, people still play drinking games because they offer a fun way to get drunk.
In a setting like a university where people at parties do not necessarily know one another well, drinking games function as a common ground, something everyone can enjoy, said Scott Stevenson, a 22-year-old senior majoring in Economics and Psychology.
People play drinking games for the social environment, Stevenson said. “You can sit down with multiple people you don’t know and still have a good time.”
Borsari’s study also reported that losing inhibitions, or breaking the ice, and getting drunk are the primary reasons drinking games are played.
Stevenson, however, said that the amount of alcohol consumed may not directly correlate with how drunk someone acts. Because a person’s actions are looked upon as possibly unintentional when they are drunk, people act as though they are drunker than they are so that others will excuse their behavior as drunken antics, Stevenson said.
“Girls do it all the time. Guys too,” he said.
Miller said she had noticed that behavior as well, but associated it with people who choose not to play drinking games but still binge drink. “Because with drinking games you have a very clear picture of how much everyone has had to drink,” Miller said.
In addition to increasing the likelihood that players drink excessive amounts of alcohol, drinking games also increase a player’s chances of having unwanted sexual contact, said Thomas Johnson and Courtney Stahl from Indiana State University’s Department of Psychology in their 2003 study called Sexual Experiences Associated With Participation in Drinking Games.
Johnson and Stahl found that drinking games “appear to be strongly associated with incidents of sexual victimization,” and “both men and women reported being taken advantage of sexually during or after play, including someone having sex with them when they were too drunk to give consent.”
Both Stevenson and Miller said they had noticed this behavior.
“I know people get taken advantage of,” in the context of drinking games, Stevenson said, “both guys and girls.”
Drinking games, however, seem to be unique to the microcosm of communal college life, becoming less and less popular as students age.
Laurel Sharmer, Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health at the State University of New York at Potsdam, said in her 2005 study Campus Living Arrangement as a Risk Factor for Participation in Drinking Games Among Undergraduates that “frequencies by age showed a steady decline in drinking game participation as the student’s age increased.”
Drinking game participation, Sharmer said, dies out almost completely after age 23.
Miller said that the declining popularity of drinking games as students age can be attributed to the settings in which students drink. When students turn 21 and can drink legally in public settings, the purpose of drinking changes from inebriation to socialization.
Miller concluded that decreasing participation as students age suggests “that students may come to college, experiment with drinking games, and then moderate their participation.”