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We summed students’ responses on the AUDIT-C; higher scores reflect higher levels of alcohol use. After we validated the factor structure for the measure, we tested for MI across gender, college status, and race/ethnicity with our confirmation sample following the sequence outlined by Marsh et al.’s (2009) 13-model taxonomy for MI for ESEM models. Remember, drinking games should always be played responsibly and within your personal limits. By choosing low-risk drinking games and following responsible tips like alternating alcoholic beverages with non-alcoholic ones, you can still have fun without putting yourself in danger. Excessive alcohol consumption can lead to poor academic performance, including missed classes, lower grades, or even dropping out of college altogether. To truly understand why people play drinking games, it’s essential to look at the mechanics of these games.
Understanding Drinking Game Behaviors: A Consideration of Alcohol Expectancies and Motives to Play and Drink
The cups sit on a table, and the ball often bounces on the floor before landing in a drink. This means players can easily consume harmful bacteria along with their drinks, leading to sickness that has nothing to do with the alcohol itself. A simple way to avoid this is to keep a separate, clean cup just for drinking and use the game cups only as targets. Alcohol can lower inhibitions and increase confidence, making it easier to approach potential romantic partners or engage in sexual activities. The main goal in beer pong is to eliminate all of your opponent’s cups before they eliminate yours. This is achieved by successfully tossing a ping pong ball into their cups, forcing them to drink the beer and remove the cup from the table.
- Future research could, therefore, examine how this array of problems might unfold as a direct result of DG participation and the amount of alcohol consumed while gaming.
- Drinking games can be a fun way to spend time with friends, but they can also lead to heavy alcohol consumption.
- First, the cross-sectional study design precludes us from making any inferences about the causal associations or the temporal order of effects among our study variables.
- People play these games for various reasons, such as to enhance thrills and excitement, social interaction and networking, cope with stress and relaxation, or conform to peer pressure.
- When we’re caught up in the fun of a drinking game, hygiene is probably the last thing on our minds.
More Than a Party Game: Beer Pong as a Sport
The present study was designed to examine whether specific gaming behaviors (frequency of play and amount of consumption) place gamers at elevated risk for negative drinking outcomes. Participation in drinking games (DG) has been identified as a common health-risk behavior among college students. However, research suggests that the frequency of DG participation alone may not pose a significant health risk; rather, gaming may be most hazardous when large amounts of alcohol are consumed. However, while enhancing thrills and excitement may be one reason why people play drinking games, it’s important not to forget that there are also risks involved in heavy alcohol consumption.
Assessing the venue could also be a useful consideration given that college drinking behaviors can be heavily influenced by context (13–15). The present study sought to test associationsbetween social anxiety symptoms, DG behaviors and consequences, and DG-specificmotives among a large, multisite sample of undergraduates. Drinking games (DG) represent a social context consisting of a set of rules and guidelines that facilitate heavy alcohol use (1). Involvement in DG can lead to a “reversal of competence;” that is, as players become more intoxicated, their skills diminish (2). Moreover, the nature of most DG is such that as participants start losing the game, they are forced to drink more as a penalty, which in turn further diminishes their skills, thus exacerbating the consumption cycle. Given these characteristics, it is hardly surprising that playing DG can place college students at elevated risk for heavy alcohol consumption (3, 4) and negative alcohol-related outcomes (5).
Negative Gaming Consequences
Each model (1–13) represents certain parameters constrained to be invariant and examining models in certain combinations, as outlined by Marsh et al. (2009), corresponds with different types of invariance. Measurement invariance (MI) is present when an observed score does not rely on group measurement, but rather, depends on the true score (Meredith, 1993; Meredith & Millsap, 1992). In the case of latent variables, the latent variable is the proxy for a person’s true score, and the items are the observed random variables, which require that the measurement model that links the individual items to the latent variable be the same across subgroups (Wu, Li, & Zumbo, 2007). Strategies such as alternating alcoholic beverages with non-alcoholic ones and eating before and during drinking can help prevent overindulgence. It’s also crucial to be aware of how much alcohol is being consumed by counting drinks or monitoring blood alcohol concentration (BAC). While it’s natural for individuals to expect certain outcomes alcohol and risk taking from consuming alcohol during game nights, it is important not to rely too heavily on those expectations or allow them to override common sense decision-making processes.
Drinking games hold a unique allure among college students, becoming a prevalent activity for socializing and celebrating throughout campuses. In fact, studies reveal that participation rates in drinking games can reach up to 91% among drinkers within this demographic. When we’re caught up in the fun of a drinking game, hygiene is probably the last thing on our minds.
Social Facilitation Theory is the idea that people tend to perform better when they are in the presence of others. This theory helps explain why drinking games are often played in groups, as the presence of peers can lead to an increase in competitive spirit and a desire to impress. The competitive beer pong scene has reached a professional level with large-scale, high-stakes tournaments. The most famous of these is The World Series of Beer Pong (WSOBP), an annual event that draws hundreds of competitors from all over the world to Las Vegas. This isn’t just a small gathering; it’s a major event with official rules, referees, and substantial rewards.
Alcohol Expectancies and Drinking Motives
By the 1980s, the paddle-less game had become a fixture in dorm rooms and fraternity houses across the country, solidifying its place in American college culture and setting the stage for its eventual mainstream popularity. Fernandez, A. C., Yurasek, A. M., Merrill, J. E., Miller, M. B., Zamboanga, B. L., Carey, K. B., & Borsari, B. Do brief motivational interventions reduce drinking game frequency in mandated students? Following provision of informed consent, participants completed the survey in one of two ways.
Alternating Alcoholic Beverages With Non-Alcoholic Ones
These beliefs can influence behavior during drinking games, as participants may expect to feel more outgoing or adventurous after consuming alcohol. To mitigate these risks, it’s important for drinkers who choose to play drinking games with their peers to be mindful of their own limits and communicate openly about boundaries and expectations with other players. For instance, some individuals may feel compelled to participate in risky behaviors or consume excessive amounts of alcohol due to peer pressure. This can lead to negative physical and mental health outcomes and academic or legal consequences.
Despite the strength and importance of the present findings, there are a number of study limitations. First, the cross-sectional study design precludes us from making any inferences about the causal associations or the temporal order of effects among our study variables. In other words, we cannot say that particular motives “caused” certain gaming behaviors. Second, due to sample size limitations, we were not able to examine MI across age groups (e.g., underage vs. legal age) and for Asian Americans in our confirmation sample, and across racial/ethnic groups in our validation sample. Thus, future invariance testing with a larger, diverse sample of underage students is needed.
Alcohol Outcome Expectancies and Valuations
As such, those who use this measure to test for gender differences or invariance should exercise caution when interpreting their findings. Despite this limitation, we want to emphasize that understanding the psychometric properties of this measure is an important first step. As a next step, we strongly encourage future researchers to investigate whether drinking game motives predict gaming behaviors and consequences above and beyond general drinking motives (while controlling for typical alcohol use, as we have done in the present study). Future research linking the 7-factor drinking game motives to prospective gaming behaviors and other validated measures that align with these motives is also needed. Fourth, because the novelty factor was only composed of two items, we recommend that future research include additional items to provide more stability for this factor.