How much of a night out is the alcohol actually responsible for?
Conditions are published figures or derived from them. Output is measured from a standard run — 1,200 people, 4 hours, fixed seed, identical for both rooms. A highlighted cell is only marked where “more” is actually better; density and volume are conditions, not scores.
A pilgrimage is the cleanest natural experiment available: an enormous crowd, at 2.5 people per square metre, with a mean blood alcohol of exactly zero. If alcohol were doing most of the work in a venue, this comparison should be lopsided.
It is lopsided in the other direction than expected. The pilgrimage produces 12.97 encounters per person per hour against the nightclub's 17.63 — 74 percent of the contact — and ends with a connected group of 480 against 213, more than twice the network.
The pilgrimage is quiet, so speech reaches 2.13 metres against 75 centimetres, and roughly half the crowd's attention is available even with the rite competing for it. Alcohol is worth a real multiplier on whether a given encounter starts — the facilitation window is a genuine measured effect — but it is a smaller term than the room's acoustics and what everyone is there to do.
