Neknominate: The Online Drinking Game Sparking Moral Panic in Britain
Kids drink. Kids use social media. Now in the United Kingdom kids are apparently drinking on social media and dying because of it. Mothers of Europe: BEWARE.
The game is called "neknominate" or "neck nominate" or "neck and nominate" (all GREAT names) and these are the rules: you drink a shit ton of alcohol on camera and then challenge ("nominate") your friends to do the same. The game, which supposedly originated in Australia (of course), was at one point a bit more strict: you were supposed to chug a pint of beer and then name two or three friends who had to complete the same task within 24 hours. Those people would nominate more people, and on and on.
Of course, those "rules" quickly unraveled. At this point — as you can see in the video above — people just film themselves doing stupid shit, like drinking an entire handle of vodka before riding a dirt bike off a ramp or pounding beers before jumping off a bridge. Neknominate, once a game of some sort, has folded in on itself. Now it's just another excuse for people to be asses on the internet.
Still, the press has molded it into the United Kingdom's version of the "Knockout Game" (minus the racism). The British tabloid The Mirror claims that five people have died playing neknominate, with the latest being a 20-year-old named Bradley Eames, who is said to have died after drinking two pints of gin in under two minutes. CNN recently did a story on the game under the headline "Viral drinking games kills 4 people."
A friend of Eames' mother told the Mirror that it's a "possibility" that his death was because of neknominate, but it will be remembered like that either way. The real lesson, as with any moral panic, is that kids will always do crazy things and old people will always search for reasons why, even if they have to make them up.