Don’t be a drinking and driving dummy

…until somebody loses a license or something. For all you poor cusses who have to hold down the office between the holidays, we have a special New Year edition of our Monday Demotivators. With New Year’s Eve just a few days away, many of you are probably thinking more about drinking than working: how much to do, how much to buy, how well you can drive when you’ve done a little. So let’s start with that last bit. You’d think that with the way most game developers drink, there’d be more Flash games devoted to the topic. All we could find were a couple that were devoted to staying vertical, like Sittin’ at a Bar (which was really just a promo for country band Rehab’s Bartender Song), or Mind Me Bloody Beer (which was a promo for British comic Johnny Vegas) and Haleed the Drunk, which was a plug for…I dunno. Haleed the Drunk? Games specifically devoted to drinking AND driving have run into marketing problems in the past, in spite of getting funding from the US Army. But we found a couple anyway. If you happen to be drunk right now, you’re probably in the right frame of mind to enjoy Drunk Driving Championship; hitting the space bar to avoid crashing gets dull pretty quickly on just coffee. Likewise with Drunk Driving Dummy, which gives you odd instructions for a drug run starting at a bar, and then sends you off. Unfortunately it sends you off in a car with a broken radio, no map, and an aerial view that makes you feel like you’re driving a car from a helicopter. I had the most fun just ramming the cop car. In terms of planning how much to drink and how much to buy for your parties, there are lots of handy on line blood alcohol calculators like this one and even an iPhone app. And for a more in-depth look at alcohol consumption that considers your entire life instead of just an evening, Lloyd’s Pharmacy in England has the Alculator. For party planning, eVite has a rather silly drink calculator. I say silly, because if you’ve ever planned a big party, you know that the booze will always run out no matter how much you buy, unless the host has a wine cellar or is a raging alky themselves. So yeah. Drinking and driving is all fun and games. Unless perhaps if you live in Texas, where they’ll be Twittering your name this year if you get busted. That may sound pretty extreme, but Texas has been pretty hard on drunk drivers for a while, starting with the (be warned, this link is pretty upsetting) Jacqueline Saburido Don’t Drink & Drive campaign. You may remember her story; she was the pretty Venezuelan college girl that was forever disfigured by burns in a drunk driving accident. Not to be all preachy about things, but that’s just one of the more dramatic of thousands of drinking and driving tragedies. I’ve personally lost three friends to drunk driving. Maybe the best way to be sure you haven’t had too much to drink if you’re driving this holiday is to not drink at all. Below are some PSA’s to help….

Denis Leary’s “He’s An Asshole” spot. Pardon the earworm:

Canadian insurance firm ICBC‘s  “When Are You Gonna Stop Drinking & Driving?” campaign:

Jacqueline Saburido’s rather disturbing “Don’t drink and drive” spot: