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By Hugh Jordan. England’s woeful performance in the World Cup so far is enough to turn anyone to drink. Luckily, the team at tech agency Caffeinehit are on hand to help, having designed a real-time drinking game iPhone app for World Cup games.
So, how does Drinking World Cup work?
“There are set forfeits for things like corners, free kicks, cards and penalties,” says Andy Ashburner, part of the Caffeinehit team which developed the app. “And there are additional forfeits for unexpected real-time events. So if Rooney swears down the camera lens [as he has a habit of doing] that might be another four fingers. At the end of the game you can look at your score and see how you did.”
If you can still see the screen.
The app was conceived at the beginning of May, giving the team less than a month to put it together, and time constraints necessitated simple technology. One drawback of the app, acknowledged by Ashburner, is that users can only play against the machine, not those they might happen to be with in the pub.
“The whole process has been a real learning curve,” he says. “In future, we would like to make it possible for players to compete against their mates. The website [which accompanies the app] is more collective. Using Facebook Connect, players can compare drinking scores after the game and get a post-match analysis of their performance. That’s proving really popular.”
That talk of the future hints at the app’s versatility. World Cups are not restricted to football and the app could work equally well for other live sporting events such as rugby, cricket and snooker, or non-sporting happenings like the General Election.
The app’s real-time element is what really sets it apart. But real-time data on a real-tight budget throws up problems too, albeit not altogether unpleasant ones.
“We have had to watch pretty much all of the World Cup games so far,” explains Ashburner. “We looked into getting live stats from the Press Association but the costs proved too expensive. So we watch the games ourselves and input events manually as they occur.”
Watching every World Cup game? Sounds awful.
If Ashburner and the team are to roll out the app again for other events, though, some kind of live feed is going to be necessary. After all, Caffeinehit can’t spend their lives gawking at sport, can they?
“No. We would want to feed in real-time data from news sources and data companies in the future,” says Ashburner. “At the moment we can only cover the England games, plus the quarters, semis and final. We have got other work to get on with too.”
Isn’t that just the truth…