Students, especially British ones, have a bit of a reputation for alcohol consumption. Might even go as far to say they’ve got a bit of a reputation of being alcoholics. But actually, a huge amount of innovation goes into the past-time that is drinking at campuses around the world – in the form of drinking games.

It’s rare to visit a university and not to learn a new drinking game – and it seems that every university has it’s own drinking jargon – where you go to learn life’s skills dictates what you call it when you meet up with your friends to drink. Up at Aston in Birmingham, it’s a ’sesh’ – down on the south coast, however, it’s called a ‘pre-lash’, or even, just a ‘lash’. And if you’re really posh, it’s just ‘pre-drinks’ or maybe to hold a ’session’. Britain’s smartest students, it would seem, are focusing their creativity and innovation not on improving society as a whole, but ensuring their university has the best and most entertaining drinking pursuits.

There are hundreds of drinking games out there – many products of incremental innovation rather than radical, as is highlighted by many sites that appear upon typing “drinking games” into Google. Yet the best way to experience these games is to learn them by visiting lots of different places – it would appear our ‘drinking culture’ has turned into just that – a culture. With norms, rituals and beliefs – and even a language, drinking, and indeed drinking innovation is a key part of university culture. So next time you see a student passed out on a pavement, maybe you shouldn’t judge them for it, but instead think of the innovative process they must have gone through to develop a game that succeeded in getting them really, rather drunk – and hope that it’s these innovative thinking skills that they develop upon graduating, and not their drinking skills.

Photo Credit: I took this one. That’s why it’s a bit blurry….