Years ago I used to read a blog by an obscure linguist (he's still around, but the old archives disappeared), and remember him saying once: Language is everywhere, I don't understand why people can not be fascinated about it. I feel the same way, and the strange quirks of everyday language bug me to no end. A fascinating issue is meaning. People seem to accept that words have different meaning without giving much thought to the issue, but how does that work? Originally all words had one meaning and one only, for obvious efficiency purposes. Then time passes and thins get messy, but a word doesn't get new meanings just like that, there must be some logical connection that makes people brains accept a new usage for the word. See for example the word "game". A game is a rule based competition done for amusement. Take the article away, and it's a set of principle useful to have sex with women. Add 'theory' to it, and it's a science that studies the strategy of conflict.
I don't write much about Game, nor preoccupy myself with feminism or other issues. That's not because I'm not interested or think it doesn't work. I discovered Roissy 5 years ago and it changed my life forever. I just don't see the benefit in spreading Game to the wider society. While Game has helped me attract more women, have sex with them, and more generally just to deal with women more effectively, that's all there is to it. My knowing game hasn't benefited the girls I've dumped, it hasn't benefited the men without game who have to deal with those women after having tasted good game. Women before Game were annoying enough, wide adoption of Game is just going to raise the hurdle to attract women, unleashing a Game arms race of ever more effective tactics to short-circuit women's "slut-defense" long enough to take your pants off and insert your penis into her vagina. Is that a good thing? It looks like the introduction of marketing insights into sex relations. Marketing is also about short-circuiting the better part of your brain who is in charge of long term financial planning and making you spend money because of some instant impulse you didn't know existed. We are all now magicians in charge of screwing with the precarious, recently evolved parts of the brain that makes us civilized.
I'm actually not very good at the finest manipulation techniques that fool girls into your bed or old women into buying insurance. I'm a bad manipulator, and while I could say it's just because I'm holier than thou and refuse to do evil, I'll just admit that I just suck at it. What I do quite well is understand what makes Game a game. Game is about competition, and in any competition, you need to understand your own position and that of your opponent. A good understanding of why men and women behave like they do is probably the best contribution that the PUA crowd have left for human wisdom. Centuries from now people will think that Game Theory was invented by Roissy.
It's a dark science though, and I'm also not very sure if its wider adoption is or not a good thing. To put it in concrete terms: I was talking with a friend of mine a while ago. He's a player, a very, very horny man who just can't help himself from spending half of every day chasing tail. You could call him a natural, he has his own method devised through trial and error, but he hasn't read any Game literature nor has any scientific understanding of why it works. Now every once in a while the guy gets burned because some girl is playing tough to get, or he fucked her but she's a cold bitch, or he just gets plainly rejected. Of course, he has an official girlfriend of his age (late 20s) who he loves very much, and feels mildly guilty about (episodes of guilt curiously always coincide with intervals of burnout).
He was bragging on how nice his girlfriend is, and how he's gonna marry her. Some day he promised her to take her to some place early in the morning, but went out the night before, so he was half dead when she got there to meet him. Instead of shouting and nagging the shit out of him for breaking his promise, she let him sleep, washed his clothes, cleaned his apartment, cooked some food for him, and woke him up at noon to eat lunch. She's an angel! She's perfect? You see?
A normal person would say, OMG she's so nice you gotta marry her and you'll be happy forever. But the dark knowledge has corrupted my soul, and I couldn't make myself feel happy for the guy. I promptly reminded him of the power unbalance of their relationship. He is a man on his prime, getting all the tail he wants, which she surely suspects if only slightly. He's freelancing and could flee and have the same lifestyle anyway he wanted. She has a soul crushing corporate job that she hates. She likes the guy very much, and she's in her late 20s, and trust me she's not likely to find the same kind of man if he were to look for a new one. She's a smart girl and she knows that she has a horrible hand, and he has a fucking royal flush. She of course wants to marry. Been saying it for a while.
Well she better be nice then. She better wash, clean, cook, and not nag you even if she catches you screwing her best friend. Of course my friend wasn't amused at my comment. "Can't you just fucking say she's nice?" All I can say is that she's smart enough to know what hand she has been dealt with. Many women don't.
People have two contradictory beliefs about behavior. In one hand, we are all a blank slate, and through education we can an all be made to do skillfully whatever is required from us. On the other hand, what people do depends on their character, which is fixed. Nice people are always nice, and nasty people are always nasty. Well to some extent that's true, nice people are nice, but incentives matter. And before making a big decision like, say, marriage, you'd better be very sure that whatever behavior from your partner is part of her character and not just responding to incentives.
But of course most people aren't unconditionally nice or honest. Most women get fat and unloving after marriage, most men fuck around if they have the option. And there's nothing we individually can do about it. Having this kind of knowledge helps when you're the only one who does, and can be two steps ahead of everyone else. But what if everyone knew? What if everybody could see each others hand? What kind of game would that be?
