Has The Term “Dating Game” Jumped The Shark?
I’ve stopped engaging arguments about whether “dating game” works or not, or whether it’s “fake” or whatever, for one simple reason: it’s hard to use the term “game” without being prepared for a fight about what you’re talking about, because it’s become such a polymorphic concept.
THESIS
In the beginning (before there was a self-styled seduction community) game was a colloquialism describing competence or style – as in “you’ve got to play your game” – and especially with women, i.e. the ability to attract and seduce. You were either born with it, or you learned it from a kind associate who took it upon himself to bring fire to the next generation, one fledgling man at a time.
ANTITHESIS
Then we entered a phase where knowledge of the venusian arts began to be transferred in a more conventional manner – not in the old way of your brother or uncle taking you out and showing you the ropes, but a formal lecture format with laboratory practicals and postgame analysis (field reports, etc). The key insight was that attraction and seduction were not immutable intrapersonal factors but could be learned en masse. There were various practitioners charging various amounts of money for personal pickup artist workshops and sponsoring online communities. The metrics were simple – how much better were you with women than before you learned game, how many more lays, how much less anxiety and disappointment did you feel.
If somebody told you to “learn game,” you picked a PUA and followed his material, and blended it with your own traits to create a scheme that worked for you.
SYNTHESIS
As time went by, the techniques of PUA expanded into LTR applications, inner game development and overall self-improvement, and methods of “game” were recognized for almost any male lifestyle and type of woman. A classic juxtaposition is the dominant nightclub-performance game of Mystery, Roissy’s brooding emo shtick, and Roosh’s low-key intellectual vibe – different but all very successful.
I feel as though we’ve come full circle to the original definition. Game is no longer a set of skills, it’s once again an abstract term for an overall understanding of good social dynamics mated with a sense of social self-determination.
If you’re good with women, you have game, whether you admit it or not. A humorous illustration is DannyFrom504, who when the topic of his considerable game comes up cops a self-effacing “who, me?” act even as he posts regularly on his day/night pickups and former conquests.
In some ways the circle is a negative, because we’re back to the pre-PUA days where you tell a guy to improve his game and there’s no single well-defined strategy to do so, but it’s also a positive in that nobody needs to feel typecast or locked in to any particular scheme, which gives total freedom to tweak the parts of your personality that need it instead of attempting a low-percentage total personality transplant.
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