This thread was inspired by one created by BadBoyGamer. I was originally going to post it as a reply to this thread, but my post ended up being very long so I decided to create it's own thread and start some discussion around some of the points I have made.
I would like to open up the discussion as to what "game" really is.
Is being conventionally good-looking, showing up to a bar with your friends, laughing and having a good time while girls shower you with IOI's and a few brazen ones even come up and open you while being all handsy, and then choosing one lucky girl to bring home with you at the end of the night considered "game"? Some might say so, some might say this is the total opposite of what "game" is supposed to be.
People in the community like to idealize game as a sort of "great equalizer" that allows otherwise unattractive men to become or act like attractive men as to sort of "short-circuit" and "hack" women's hard-wired psychological algorithms in order to reap success with them. While game isn't exactly this sort of magic bullet, it still certainly has its merits. I like to think of game as simply "Social IQ" - how well you can pickup on and read social cues and act on them accordingly. In a perfect world, this would all be "natural" and subconscious and operate without any conscious input. But alas, we are not in a perfect world and here we are discussing with each other on forums the nuances of our interactions with women, in an attempt to improve our social IQ / game to achieve more success with women.
So you can have two camps of thought, that are both on polar opposite ends of each other.
On one camp you have the pessimistic game deniers: looks / status are all that matter. Game is nothing more than a guy in a weird looking hat trying to sell you an e-book. Women are all hypergamous whores that only want the top X% Chad Thundercocks and the rest of us normal men are left in the dust.
On the other camp you have the guys with their heads in the clouds (and also far up their own ass): game is the only thing that matters. You can be 3 feet tall with no teeth and smell like piss but as long as you know game and are alpha as fuck then girls will drop to your feet. If you get rejected, it's because she's rejecting your game - nothing else.
Now, both camps actually have merit. They are just too extreme and see the world as far too black and white instead of its true shades of grey. And here's a funny thing, all it takes is meeting one man that exemplifies each camp to turn yourself into a "game denier" or "game worshipper"
If you befriend a Chad Thundercock, a true natural good-looking alpha. You will have your eyes open to some harsh truths about how unfair the world can be. Girls will throw themselves at a man like this. And they will have true and pure abundance and it will be a positive feed back loop of: abundance, pre-selection, more abundance, more pre-selection, and so on and so on. Chad acts alpha without thinking about acting alpha because he has true abundance without thinking about having true abundance, and he has mad pre-selection without trying to make it look like he has mad pre-selection ... he just straight up has it. By befriending Chad, you will see the side of women 90% of guys never see: hot girls will double and triple text him, they will call him on weekend nights drunk begging to sleep over or begging to see him. Girls will act BETA as fuck around chad even though these same girls are curving so many guys left right and centre and have probably 100 unread messages on their phones, yet the only message they care about is if Chad is every gonna reply to them. I'd like to see a pick-up artist tell a funny story about all the hot stripper girlfriends he bangs in his mansion and steal all these girls from Chad.
Now, for the other camp, you can convert over by meeting a different type of man: the scumbag pickup artist.
This is the guy that isn't super good looking or super cool and doesn't have a massive social circle. Average looking or maybe even a little ugly. But this guy has mad balls. And he is also probably a sociopath or just a friendless loser that doesn't have much to lose by approaching, so he approaches en masse. This guy fucks a ton of girls, and has crazy pulls too. Bathroom pulls, banging girls within 30 minutes of meeting them, banging girls that told him to fuck off during his opener and called him gross. These guys can cause rational men to scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck is going on. But at the end of the day, these guys are just applying the raw numbers game. It works, but it's not very fulfilling and the effort-to-reward ratio can be low. Also, it doesn't regularly net you the hottest girls (the ones waiting for Chad to text them back) nor does it give you much retention. In fact, you get a lot of buyers remorse. A lot of pulls end up being a "right time, right place" spur-of-the-moment type thing where a momentary lapse of judgement leads to a quick pull. So you won't have much for fulfilling relationships. But nevertheless. this person proves that game can "work" and all the girls in the world aren't monopolized by the hottest guys and completely out of reach for the average joe.
I've been in the game for many years now, and have a notch count north of 200 (back when I used to be proud of my notch count and used it as a source of validation). So I have actually jumped back and forth between both camps for quite some time. The more I hang out with my natural "Chad" friends and see the kind of shit they experience, I become tempted to denounce game and refer to all of you forum members as losers (in my head). Conversely, when I see how beta and clueless a lot of these Chads actually are deep-down, then I realize that its more complex, and some of the members on this forum are incredibly bright and have knowledge that you cannot learn from mainstream society. This forum, when the right discussions are had, is an absolute goldmine.
So now, my current take on "game" is this: It matters if you want to have a HAPPY and SUCCESSFUL dating / love life. Non-negotiable. You have to have knowledge on the true nature of women and how the world works. You have to have some social IQ and know how to navigate social situations effectively and efficiently. But game is not a magic bullet. If you don't meet a girls looks threshold (GoodLookingLoser has a really good article on this), then no game in the world can save you. Move on. Also, looks matter greatly. They matter more to some women that to others, but they do matter. Good looks can make women MUCH more forgiving of any game "mistakes" that you make. It makes women much more willing to brush over any other issues that may be there - that is why Chads can actually be so pathetic and beta deep down but still get results. And that's also why the scumbag pickup artist has to be 100% on-point with his game, cause if he fucks up at all, the girls are gone.
Game is how you conduct yourself.
I would like to open up the discussion as to what "game" really is.
Is being conventionally good-looking, showing up to a bar with your friends, laughing and having a good time while girls shower you with IOI's and a few brazen ones even come up and open you while being all handsy, and then choosing one lucky girl to bring home with you at the end of the night considered "game"? Some might say so, some might say this is the total opposite of what "game" is supposed to be.
People in the community like to idealize game as a sort of "great equalizer" that allows otherwise unattractive men to become or act like attractive men as to sort of "short-circuit" and "hack" women's hard-wired psychological algorithms in order to reap success with them. While game isn't exactly this sort of magic bullet, it still certainly has its merits. I like to think of game as simply "Social IQ" - how well you can pickup on and read social cues and act on them accordingly. In a perfect world, this would all be "natural" and subconscious and operate without any conscious input. But alas, we are not in a perfect world and here we are discussing with each other on forums the nuances of our interactions with women, in an attempt to improve our social IQ / game to achieve more success with women.
So you can have two camps of thought, that are both on polar opposite ends of each other.
On one camp you have the pessimistic game deniers: looks / status are all that matter. Game is nothing more than a guy in a weird looking hat trying to sell you an e-book. Women are all hypergamous whores that only want the top X% Chad Thundercocks and the rest of us normal men are left in the dust.
On the other camp you have the guys with their heads in the clouds (and also far up their own ass): game is the only thing that matters. You can be 3 feet tall with no teeth and smell like piss but as long as you know game and are alpha as fuck then girls will drop to your feet. If you get rejected, it's because she's rejecting your game - nothing else.
Now, both camps actually have merit. They are just too extreme and see the world as far too black and white instead of its true shades of grey. And here's a funny thing, all it takes is meeting one man that exemplifies each camp to turn yourself into a "game denier" or "game worshipper"
If you befriend a Chad Thundercock, a true natural good-looking alpha. You will have your eyes open to some harsh truths about how unfair the world can be. Girls will throw themselves at a man like this. And they will have true and pure abundance and it will be a positive feed back loop of: abundance, pre-selection, more abundance, more pre-selection, and so on and so on. Chad acts alpha without thinking about acting alpha because he has true abundance without thinking about having true abundance, and he has mad pre-selection without trying to make it look like he has mad pre-selection ... he just straight up has it. By befriending Chad, you will see the side of women 90% of guys never see: hot girls will double and triple text him, they will call him on weekend nights drunk begging to sleep over or begging to see him. Girls will act BETA as fuck around chad even though these same girls are curving so many guys left right and centre and have probably 100 unread messages on their phones, yet the only message they care about is if Chad is every gonna reply to them. I'd like to see a pick-up artist tell a funny story about all the hot stripper girlfriends he bangs in his mansion and steal all these girls from Chad.
Now, for the other camp, you can convert over by meeting a different type of man: the scumbag pickup artist.
This is the guy that isn't super good looking or super cool and doesn't have a massive social circle. Average looking or maybe even a little ugly. But this guy has mad balls. And he is also probably a sociopath or just a friendless loser that doesn't have much to lose by approaching, so he approaches en masse. This guy fucks a ton of girls, and has crazy pulls too. Bathroom pulls, banging girls within 30 minutes of meeting them, banging girls that told him to fuck off during his opener and called him gross. These guys can cause rational men to scratch their heads and wonder what the fuck is going on. But at the end of the day, these guys are just applying the raw numbers game. It works, but it's not very fulfilling and the effort-to-reward ratio can be low. Also, it doesn't regularly net you the hottest girls (the ones waiting for Chad to text them back) nor does it give you much retention. In fact, you get a lot of buyers remorse. A lot of pulls end up being a "right time, right place" spur-of-the-moment type thing where a momentary lapse of judgement leads to a quick pull. So you won't have much for fulfilling relationships. But nevertheless. this person proves that game can "work" and all the girls in the world aren't monopolized by the hottest guys and completely out of reach for the average joe.
I've been in the game for many years now, and have a notch count north of 200 (back when I used to be proud of my notch count and used it as a source of validation). So I have actually jumped back and forth between both camps for quite some time. The more I hang out with my natural "Chad" friends and see the kind of shit they experience, I become tempted to denounce game and refer to all of you forum members as losers (in my head). Conversely, when I see how beta and clueless a lot of these Chads actually are deep-down, then I realize that its more complex, and some of the members on this forum are incredibly bright and have knowledge that you cannot learn from mainstream society. This forum, when the right discussions are had, is an absolute goldmine.
So now, my current take on "game" is this: It matters if you want to have a HAPPY and SUCCESSFUL dating / love life. Non-negotiable. You have to have knowledge on the true nature of women and how the world works. You have to have some social IQ and know how to navigate social situations effectively and efficiently. But game is not a magic bullet. If you don't meet a girls looks threshold (GoodLookingLoser has a really good article on this), then no game in the world can save you. Move on. Also, looks matter greatly. They matter more to some women that to others, but they do matter. Good looks can make women MUCH more forgiving of any game "mistakes" that you make. It makes women much more willing to brush over any other issues that may be there - that is why Chads can actually be so pathetic and beta deep down but still get results. And that's also why the scumbag pickup artist has to be 100% on-point with his game, cause if he fucks up at all, the girls are gone.
Game is how you conduct yourself.
Grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference