Jed posted an entry a couple of days ago on the subject of drinking games. He asked what the point was of those TV-show or movie-based drinking games where everyone drinks when certain specified events occur.

My first guess was that nobody actually plays these games: that all the fun comes from constructing the rules and seeing how many of a show's peculiar quirks you can encompass in a rule set. It's hard for me to imagine anybody actually playing one of these things. Can you picture a bunch of people sitting in front of a TV, beers in one hand and 3 page printout of rules in the other, taking carefully rationed sips of booze every time McCoy says, "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not an X"? As Jed says, why not just drink?

On the other hand, I may just be underestimating people's desire to ritualize the act of getting trashed. I've never been much of a drinker (caffeine is my drug of choice), but I've heard plenty of descriptions of college parties which involved drinking rituals that were just as seemingly pointless as a TV show drinking game. But I never heard of anyone actually playing a TV show drinking game.

When I was in junior high, my friends and I used to play drinking games with cards, but with diet Coke instead of anything alcoholic. One of the things we observed was that people who lost and had to drink tended to keep losing, almost as if they were "getting drunk" and losing their ability to play. It must have been some kind of psychological effect, since I can't imagine that it was the result of the diet Coke.

On a further note, this is the first time I've attempted to post in HTML. Hope this works.