We’ve finally done it.
It’s taken literal years, but we finally have a somewhat-comprehensive survey of Dunedin’s beer pong rules. You’d think this would be relatively easy, but you would be oh-so-wrong. This counts as a sport, right?
Three years ago, I wrote a piece about Dunedin’s King’s Cup rules. We sent out a survey, got a few hundred responses and crunched the data, and that was that. Simples. “On to beer pong,” I thought, before stumbling across what ended up being an excellent example of a problem that plagues bona fide scientists: surveying a quantitative vs qualitative dataset. It has kept me up at night ever since.
In King’s Cup, you only have 13 different cards, so there’s a maximum of 13 different rules to survey. You might have some extreme variation within those rules, but the confines are clear and convenient. 13 cards per suit, four suits per deck. Done and dusted.
Beer pong has infinite rules, as anyone who’s ever had a mid-game argument will know. When can you rearrange? Can you bounce the ball? What happens if you do bounce the ball? Can you catch it? What’s a valid trick shot? The questions are endless - so how do you even begin to build a survey to get the answers? And once you have those answers, how do you know you didn’t miss anything?
Since games and data are the only two things near and dear to my heart, this piece proved impossible to write. For years, I barred everyone in the office from even attempting to take over the project, telling them, “You have no idea what you’re getting into. It’s dangerous. It’s maddening. You cannot do it, for your own safety.” And finally, I conceded. I learned to let go. I relinquished my editorial child into the open arms of our news editor. Much like your parents, I watched my baby go on into someone else’s supervision, with little control on how the student masses at Otago would treat it. I hoped, I prayed, and I crossed my fingers.
And I’m proud of how it’s grown. Nina had fresh eyes, and was able to design a survey that was “long as fuck” according to some dude I met at a party. “Long as fuck”, of course, translates in the science community to “of appropriate rigour and scope”, so this was a compliment, really. And while I know that the qualitative nature of the question makes it fundamentally impossible to answer with a quantitative survey, I hope that we’ve at least hit it close enough.
If not, there’s always redemption.