Should drinking be a game?

Peer Pressure or purely for pleasure? (Photo: Jude Hill)

Drinking games: peer pressure or just a bit of fun? Tom Lane looks into the popular student activity

IN some countries denying the Holocaust is an imprisonable offence. In others it is a useful technique to avoid having to down a disgusting pint. Holocaust denial, you see, is a highly celebrated and rare moment in that exponentially expanding juggernaut, the Hitler Drinking Game, by which the player in possession of the two of spades – the ‘Hitler card’ –

is exempt from drinking the contents of a communal beer glass, known as ‘the Holocaust’, thereby denying it.

You may not have heard about the Hitler Drinking Game, but let me assure you, you soon will. The media rather foolishly kicked up a storm when it got wind of the Facebook group; the creators were expelled from Huddersfield University but lauded on the internet, and since then the game’s popularity has gone through the roof.

It hasn’t been a good month of publicity for drinking games. In January the Government announced that licensed premises would no longer be allowed to organise ‘dentist’s chair’ activities, involving the squirting of spirits directly into mouths. Never mind that the dentist’s chair has rarely been seen since 1996, the message is clear: getting drunk should not be a sport.

Reports often focus on drinking games within universities, perhaps for two reasons; first, because they are such a pillar of our culture; and secondly, commentators believe that we are young and impressionable. With the latter point no doubt in mind, one doctor, Sarah Jarvis, interviewed by Sky News, is quoted as saying: ‘There’s peer pressure, and the more you drink the more successful you are. You want to please people and be one of the crowd, especially if you are a student that’s just arrived at university.’

Does this really ring true? Possibly, in the very first few weeks of university, a naïve student may be at risk of learning an unfortunate morning-after lesson. Equally, however, experts may ignore the fact that most eighteen-year-olds have already had years of alcohol experience and choose to drink lots because, far from craving ‘success’, they find it to be quite fun.

Peer pressure was an irrelevant issue to most of the Freshers I spoke to about drinking games. Far more burning an issue was boredom. ‘We used to play Ring of Fire in my flat as pre-drinks for every night out,’ Katherine, a first-year in Tennis Courts, said, ‘but it just stopped being fun. We got to the stage when it was like, ok, so we’ve got to keep on naming types of bird, have we? And then we just gave up, so now we have to talk to each other instead.’

But are there not instances of social pressure applied on unwilling participants? Dave, a Mason Hall resident, seemed unsure. ‘Last term there was a game of Touch The Cup when a guy was forced to down of mixture of Lambrini and Absinthe. You could tell he was pretty reluctant, and he didn’t smile much for the rest of the night. I guess if we didn’t have drinking games people would just find other ways to push each other around.’

With regard to the accusations of poor taste launched at games such as Hitler and Punch in The Face (where players must propose toasts, often to obscenely inappropriate people or events, or risk being hit) a balanced view is harder to reach. As with downing a dirty pint, no-one should be made to ironically revere fascism against their will, but given this country’s long history of treating dictatorships as a source of amusement, it is hard to escape the feeling that Huddersfield University made a gross misjudgement by expelling the Hitler Game’s inventors.