Chances are, if you are a member of a Co-ed, Fraternity or Sorority house, or a varsity athlete, and are playing with a usual or romantic partner, you probably won your pong game last night -- at least according to John Pryor, the College statistician and director of Student Affairs Planning, Evaluation and Research. Hoping to explain and evaluate the increasing popularity of drinking games at Dartmouth, Pryor has prepared a study that looks specifically at the phenomenon of beer pong at the College.
Many of Pryor's findings, based on responses of pong-playing behavior in 2003, are not surprising.
Participation is highest among the CFS demographic. Eighty percent of this group said they had played pong within the past two weeks, followed by varsity athletes, at 76 percent. The lowest demographic was among members of religious and ethnic organizations, 40-41 percent of whom said they had played pong in the last two weeks, and members of international student organizations at 40-41 percent.
The percentage of students who had played in the past two weeks also varied among freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors with 48 percent, 62 percent, 65 percent and 60 percent, respectively.
Furthermore, 26 percent of students played only one game in their last outing, 22 percent played two games, 15 percent played three, eight percent played four and nine percent played five or more games. Twenty percent of students claimed to have never played pong.
Pryor included a set of pong-specific questions in his yearly alcohol survey last May after noticing a 60 percent increase from 1997 to 2003 in the percentage of students who claimed to have participated in drinking games in the past month.
Most striking was the increase in the percentage of women who had played drinking games in the past month, which rose from less than 30 percent in 1997 to 58 percent in 2003. The percentage of men who had played drinking games in the past month rose from approximately 50 percent to 66 percent over the same period.
"I'm not sure why we have seen this increase, but it seems to be socially driven," Pryor said.
"Of course some people play pong to get drunk, but I think they also like it because it creates a social scene with prescribed rules. You go in some place where people are playing pong, you get on table and you know the rules and how to behave, and that is comforting," Pryor continued.
Pryor found the most popular variations of pong at Dartmouth to be shrub and tree, which were named as their favorite variation by 33 and 31 percent of the student body, respectively. Eight percent of students named line or death and six percent named ship as their favorite variation.
Among students who had played more than two nights in the past two weeks, 24 percent had "booted and rallied" in that period, 27 percent had gone to class unprepared because of alcohol and forty-five percent had "blacked out."
Some of the Pryor's most interesting statistics broke down the different sorts of pong teams.
Same-sex pairs made up 54 percent of teams, usual partners made up 35 percent, new partners made up 33 percent, steady romantic couples made up 17 percent and "potential romantic partners" made up 10 percent.
Familiar pairings -- either usual partners or romantic couples -- tended to win the most games.
The power of positive thinking also prevailed, as players who considered themselves excellent won an average of 3.24 games in their last outing, "good" players won an average of 1.81 games, "fair" players won an average of .65 games and "poor" players won an average of .26 games.
Eleven percent considered themselves excellent players, 35 percent considered themselves good players, 26 percent considered themselves fair players and 16 percent considered themselves poor players.
Pryor geared his presentation toward faculty and administrators, such as the Residential Life Staff and the Social Events Management Procedure staff, many of whom, he explained, "have no idea that this game is so pervasive."
"Since beer pong is such a part of the Dartmouth experience, we decided we should analyze what sort of role pong fills in the Dartmouth social scene," Pryor said.
Pryor's presentation drew a variety of responses from his audiences, alarming some administrators while merely re-enforcing social understanding of others.
"When John told us the percentage of students that blackout while playing pong, there was a gasp from all sides of the room, especially from my administrative staff," Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman said.
Although he was shocked by the percentage of students who engaged in dangerous drinking, Redman did not expect to change ORL policy in response.
"The question for us is how would we do anything even if we wanted to, so we're not going to create a policy around banning it -- that would be foolhardy at best," Redman said.
"Still, pong is a drinking game no matter how you cut it. It hasn't risen to Olympic stature yet and it is based around alcohol so I don't think it will," Redman continued.
Pryor acknowledged that some of the statistics might have been inflated because the survey was given less than two weeks after the pong-heavy 2003 Green Key weekend, but he also claimed that the survey, which included 669 online responses, captured an accurate microcosm of the student body, if accurate only over Green Key.
"If we had 100 percent response, would the results be the same? There's no way to know. But I've been doing this for a dozen years and I have a pretty good feel for when things are accurate," Pryor said.
Despite statistical assurances, students remain skeptical toward many of the less intuitive alcohol and pong-related statistics compiled by the College.
For some fraternity brothers looking over the recent set of statistics, the percentage of pong partners of the same sex stood out as irrationally low, for instance and the percentage of students that had blacked out stood out as strangely high. Fraternity brothers also offered a different perspective on the massive statistical increase from 1997 to 2003 in the percentage of students, especially female, that played pong at least once a month.
"I think pong wasn't as big a thing at all in the late-nineties and a lot of houses just had one table, so it was a lot harder to play pong unless you were a brother in a frat, and this obviously excluded women," said Andrew Mulligan '05, an Alpha Chi Alpha member.
"But while I've been here I don't think there has been much of a rise in people playing pong," Mulligan said.
