The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

NOT ALL MAGICIANS ARE LIKE THE PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK!

Ok, got that out of the way, now onto my thoughts. Most of what I thought about this book, both before I opened it and when I started it was wrong. At first I thought it would be an interesting look at this weird subculture (which it was, but not all it was about), then when I started reading it, I thought it was this misogynist bible, reducing women to numbers and pick ups to formulas (which it was, but not all it was about), and then I was pleasantly surprised when I found that the book was also this arc of the author's self discovery (this was the best part).

It is sad to say, that most people are predictable. Ask a waitress who's worked at the same place for a long time, she can probably tell you what people will order just by looking at them. These pick up artists use this (as do many "psychics") plus different psychological hooks to pick up women. I can see why they have to reduce women to numbers because someone with low self esteem who needs help talking to people need that kind of boost to give them enough confidence to go for it.

Watching the author grow was really the best part. The gaining of his confidence, the mastery of his skills and finding who he became was really a joy to read. I think the last quarter of the book, was the most compelling, and it was difficult to put down.

I would recommend this book to men and women alike. I think everyone can gain something by reading it.

I am giving this book 4 stars only because there is no 4.5 to rate.

As far as I 've been superficially following the development of the game in the last 5 years or so, I had no Idea How it all started. So I'm happy that I read this.
Here you find really good insight of pick up community.
However, I consider that some of the views can be subjective here, and written from the place of arrogance, but It is how anyone tells the story of him being so good. Apparently, the author was that good... Idk.
Surprising that I read about RSD alongside with other companies. So now I know, kind of...

I recommend reading it if you are familiar with the game already. Or even if you are not. Even if you are a girl or something like me

wtf am I talking about... ok.. f.it, i roll.

Не съдържа отговори на въпроси, свързани с личностното развитие. Съдържа отговор на въпроса как се прави тройка. Съдържа и много истории на абсолютно откачени хора, които го играят гурута и духовни водачи.

2 причини да не дам 5-ца. Първата е, че оставя усещане за мърсотия и е смущаваща. Втората, че не ми звучи достоверно.

2 причини да не й дам 1-ца. Мърсотията не я прави лоша. Това, че звучи недостоверно не значи, че не се е случила.

Препоръчвам само на хора със здрави нерви, които четат бързо.

Hoo boy, how to rate the seminal book that launched the Manosphere? I first became interested in this book because of my love of books. I found a leatherbound copy in a used book-shop in Seoul. I ended up not buying it, but the book's weird biblical format, and in-depth look at a a secret society of men who could have sex with any woman they wanted was naturally intriguing.

That said, when I finally got around to reading it - not the leather-bound biblical version, but as an e-book - it was basically obvious from quite literally Page 1 that the kind of men who enter this world are desperately emotionally damaged, and the kind of women that fall for their schtick have their own emotional handicap.

Indeed, looking up contemporary reviews for the book, only the book's apparent target market - lonely, nerdy, confused men who are attracted to the idea that there's a way to cheat-code (in a hundred acronyms) reproductive biology and dating culture in the post-modern age - seem fooled by the facade on these broken, self-determined experts in the art of human seduction. By the end of the book, half of them (including, allegedly, Neil Strauss himself) realize that the hole inside of them that they desperately try to fill with sex is actually a hole that is far deeper and far more abyssal than they realize.

Hell, the opening scene of the book involves Mystery, whose "Mystery method" involves accosting women with magic tricks experiencing one of his many emotional breakdowns recorded in the book. It's hard for me to understand how anyone could actually read this book understanding the type of men and type of women it describes and go, "This is the goal. This is what I want to achieve in my life." Neil Strauss describes having a pair of daughters who accuse him of sexism, which he shrugs off with, "I guess I kind of am," and that's not exactly the be-all-end-all of the book's gender issues. Rather, I find the book's understanding of men to be far more pessimistic than any thought these self-proscribed pick-up artists have ever had about women.

As a bad Chuck Palahniuk novel, it's an interesting story, but is pretty passable. As a piece of journalism, it earns its second star, but brought down by its focus on the continuous emotional collapse of the men in question. There's a huge section of the text devoted to Courtney Love. Not as an object or even subject of their pick up community (if she has sex with any of the men in Project Hollywood, Strauss has kept it secret, and if anything, she tries to learn "the game" in order to seduce a man in her life, a Freudian fever dream, certainly) but as a kind of hanger-on. Strauss interviews her for a magazine article, an interview which ends up turning into a days-long bender, very much bringing Strauss' objectivity as a journalist into question (though by the time we reach that point in the book, journalistic objectivity is clearly more of a wink and gun gesture), she then moves in with the PUAs in their California "Project Hollywood" frat house, and after a Russian stripper named Katya triggers another Mystery emotional breakdown, resulting in violence and chaos, she brings out one of Kurt Cobain's shirts to use as an altar to purify the air.

Maybe it's showing my age, but the pulling out of Kurt's shirt triggered something in my brain and I realized that, oh, yeah, Kurt Cobain was Courtney Love's husband. And below the story of a secret society of pick-up artists, which constantly hovered on the line between somewhat fascinating and extremely boring - broken men who bully insecure women into having sex with them - there was this Bojack Horseman-style story of a Hollywood starlet going through a slow-motion process of grief-driven self-destruction, falling over herself after her husband's suicide.

Once you get through all these parts, it really sets in that this book is an incomplete tragedy. This "secret society of pick up artists" was really just a way to turn insecure men into sex addicts. Strauss among them. One of these PUAs calls himself "Tyler Durden," who goes through a lot of stupidity - according to Strauss' account - to become the alpha male of their little club. The irony of "The Game" being a bad Chuck Palahniuk novel is no more clear than someone appropriating a name about a book which is fundamentally about the fever dream personification of all the repressed toxic masculinity of modern life, bubbling forth into violence before their human counterpart is institutionalized.

It's an interesting book to read, worth it if only for their trip to Transnistria, and as a piece to the Courtney Love story. Of course, those who have used the book have clearly looked past (or failed to see) the brokenness and depression at the heart of the pick-up artist lifestyle, which has only turned more virulent, more sadistic, and more toxic in the years since it was originally published.

Narcisista al tiempo que curioso. Digno de leer como entretenimiento.

Un libro muy divertido y entrañable, el autor nos da ciertos tips para ligar contando su odisea como maestro de la seducción en la jungla norteamericana.

If Mr. Strauss were trying to be funny, he seriously needs to work on his sense of humor. On the contrary if he were serious...well...a real waste of time...

Great story of rise and fall of a subculture.