Over the summer, I attempted to teach my friends from suburbia to play pong, which eventually lead to an errant throw save attempt into someone's head, massive frustration by all parties and non-Keystone beer spilled all over the carpet in my parents' basement. (FACT: if you accidentally pour an entire 2-litre bottle of diet Coke on a carpet, your parents will probably accept your profuse apologies and all beer stains can be written off as part of said accident. How I know that is not important at this time.)
I abandoned my efforts after the seven millionth comment that "it would be so much easier to play Beirut instead" (THAT IS NOT A GAME IT IS HOW YOU DECIDE WHO SERVES KTHXBYE). I retired to the sidelines to make snarky comments and to further cement the stereotype that Dartmouth students take obnoxious pride in the superior game of pong.
Interestingly, despite our steadfast commitment to playing drinking games with paddles only, one of the top complaints I see posted on bored@baker things I have noticed from reasoned and intellectual discussion with my esteemed colleagues is the near-universal hatred of the concept of pong as a date. This is supposed to be one of the main indicators that romance at Dartmouth is dead. While I'll admit that standing ankle-deep in frat basement slime of questionable origin while drinking only the finest Keystone that Stinson's has to offer isn't going to make anyone's top 10 gooey Hallmark-style moments, I do without hesitation present the following:
In Defense of Pong as a Date.
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The first major benefit is that pong is not necessarily a date. While this can be confusing and lead to consternation over mixed signals (omg do I send him a blitz if we just played pong??), it also provides you with the perfect out if things get real awk, real fast. All you committed to do was to play a game. Once the game is over, you're a free agent. (NOTE: if you win, your partner may expect you to stick around and hold table. I would never EVER suggest throwing a pong-game on purpose in order to get the hell out of a situation. Nope.)
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In the event that things ARE actually going well, pong provides lots of opportunities for subtle flirting. Abusing the "celebratory hug after a particularly good save or sink" tactic has gotten many people a long way. CAVEAT: if you get excessively kissy-face, I'm not waiting for you to stop before I serve into you two. Finish the game first.
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Pong provides major facetime. This is key to all Dartmouth activities, and will make both people involved happy. If you're happy, you'll associate the other person with this happy feeling. Bingo, long term relationship! Conclusion: facetime leads to marriages. Is there anything it can't do?
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You can use the delicate situation of "who drinks, when, and how much" to gauge how the evening is going. (Boys, I apologize, but I've only ever been on one side of this situation, so you're on your own for advice.) Girls if he likes you, he is more likely to be concerned about impressing you by demonstrating his manly capacity to drink lots 'o beer. Pass some of your cups his way to find out. Unrelated: it is possible that I missed the point of my women and gender studies class.
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If you go on enough pong-date-interaction things, you will train yourself to think of that as the "acceptable" kind of date, so freshmen, if you're interested in any of the upperclassmen around here, pong as a date may be the only way to get through to them. Evidence: I, a senior girl, just wrote 650 words DEFENDING the practice of pong. This is possibly because my life is a joke, but it's probably just because I went to Dartmouth. Also, I have next.
