Game is a specialised set of communication skills toward the purpose of picking up women. Outside of the pick-up community, discrete units of effective and repeatable communication in this domain are known as (chat-up) lines, whilst entrants to the community proceed directly to the more sophisticated monologues and dialogues known as routines. After a while, many guys tire of routines and look for a more seamless way of getting laid. At this point they are pointed in the direction of so-called “naturals” and are urged to observe and copy many of their attributes – their clothes, their lifestyles, their attitudes, their gym memberships. These attributes are basically macro-routines, again effective at picking up women, with the added advantage of feeling more natural. Guys who are able to adopt these routines are usually pretty successful with women, wear great clothes, and have enviable lifestyles – and this is the natural endpoint on most students of the pick-up arts’ paths.
So is there anything beyond this endpoint, something which separates pick-up as an art from pick-up as a toolset for success with women; is there something in the venusian arts which parallels the spiritual dimension of the martial arts? In order to answer this question, we need to consider for a moment the fundamental problem of communication, and what constitutes skill in its domain. In a communication, there are two participants – let’s say a PUA and a HB. The PUA communicates his meaning – or his intent – by means of a symbol – perhaps an action, or some spoken words – which in turn has its meaning (intent) interpreted by the HB in order to determine what response (action) she should take. Let’s view that diagramatically:
Meaning (intent) –> action –> meaning (interpretation) -> action
The PUA’s intent is the meaning he would like the HB to interpret. Her actual interpretation may not match his intent. For example, he may throw her a neg in order to cause her to respond with more attraction; but she may just think he’s an asshole and respond with less attraction. Errors of this sort are usually referred to in the pick-up literature as “miscallibration”.
Let’s flip things the other way around and have the HB initiate the communication. Here she says something like “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight”, where her meaning is in this case exactly the opposite. If the novice PUA interprets her words literally, his error stops this romance dead in its tracks. This is the fundamental problem of communication – that people don’t always mean what they say (or do), or say (do) what they mean.
Over time, however, people develop experience in a particular area of communication and more and more are able to say the right thing, and infer the right meaning. And this is what routines are for – they’re shrinkwrapped experience packaged for rapid progress in a specific area. But what if you’re unable to develop this experience – what if the mechanism for acquiring experience through the observation and participation in social situations is broken or dysfunctional in some way? And what if this failure is not a natural way of being but a product of the social and cultural environment in which we live? To be clear, I’m not talking about the guy who’s never even spoken to a woman, but moreso the guy who encounters women on a frequent and social basis but who is not able to enjoy the type of interaction with these women that he would like. Inadvertantly he has become an expert at the set of routines and behaviours necessary for not being successful with women. This may be because the set of routines necessary for being successful in business, or in the social domain which envelops his day-to-day affairs is quite contradictory to the set of routines necessary for being successful with women. Over-enthusiastic adopters of the routines germane to the pick-up domain often find that their success in other social settings suffers – this is what is known as “weird pick-up artist” syndrome.
So if the goal is to not replace one set of routines with another set and forever having to be swapping back and forth as appropriate, but to reignite the underlying ability for natural social observation and expression in any generalised environment, then how useful are the routines of pick up? This depends on whether a specific set or model encourages or discourages one’s natural social ability. On the one hand routines are described as the training wheels of pick up, stabilisers which support the bike whilst you learn how to ride on two wheels, and on the other hand people have described – and these are the ones who are self-aware enough to notice it in thesmelves – how routines have f@%ked them up and how they’ve had to go back and unlearn these programs in order to progress beyond a certain plateau. The art of communication, as it applies to pick-up or any conceivable social environment, is the ability to interact with another human being at the level of meaning, that is to interpret every action and to express every sentence without bias or preconception but purely on the basis of its meaning in that place and in that moment with that other person. The endpoint of pick-up for the pick-up artist should not be the number of girls he lays, or the enviableness of his social life, but the degree to which he has perfected his art of communication.
True social arts insight. Like surfing a on wave or soaring on a thermal… there is nothing greater than perfecting your balance… challenge to mastery.
This post title would be a good follow up to gamblers book.
Is it necessary to first learn routines, or is it just possible to just try to learn natural game? Routines help that’s for sure but are they necessary? Or is it the routine structure you need to learn, the way a conversation is build and how you can change the outcome?
The controversy over routines exists, I think, precisely because they’re effective – as compared to say chat-up lines, which girls caught onto a long time ago. Men are trying to stay one step ahead in this game of bluff and conquer. The problem with routines is that for many guys they feel unnatural – either right from the word go, or after an initial honeymoon period. Most of us are stuck in the 9-5 grind of protocolised routine-type interactions at work, so at the end of the day – or week, we really want to kick back and just be ourselves. That’s why a lot of guys are happy to trade a bit of effectiveness for a bit more naturalness, and this is a trade-off forced upon us anyway when we become so sick of the routine of routines that they are no longer effective for us. The natural game on the market today occupies this halfway house between routines and being natural – a sort of natural routine, as it were. The real payoff of learning routines, or natural routines, I think, is if they reawaken the natural social animal inside each of us, and this is what I’m going to write more about in upcoming posts.
I actually view Natural & Routine game as one and the same. A natural uses patterns and routines to communicate too but does so without knowing, without sharing andor without labelling. Life is all about routines & patterns. The difference comes in your attitude… do you learn other people’s canned routine solely to support an entire interaction or do you demonstrate your own persona with your own personal insight, wit, humour, charm and charisma etc! Or indeed take what works for you and as said above blend the two.
I am interested in AnthonyP’s thoughts on influencing both your own & her state/mood. I think this is the essence of any interaction…
I’m not sure I think very consciously in terms of state and mood, nor in terms of influence. Perhaps I pigeonhole all of these factors into what I call directness, which I actually saw a very good example of whilst having lunch earlier today. It was a small seaside restaurant, and the waiter was also the owner of the establishment, and I what I noticed was that in the time honoured routine of the waiter approaching customers who have just sat down at a table he delivered his approach some 30-40 centimetres closer to the customers than is customary. Normally a waiter is quite careful to not get into the customer’s space, to remain peripheral yet available, but in this case, either because he was the owner of the place, or because it was a small outdoor restaurant in a sleepy seaside village, or because of the bent of his personality, he stood just that little bit closer and the relationship between him and the customer was, as a consequence, much more intimate than is usually the case. I liked him, as did my girlfriend, and I could see that the other customers liked him too, although in exactly the same way as I experience in a pick-up scenario the initial split-second reaction from the customer was defensive. I’m going to write a post soon on what I mean more generally when I talk about directness, but if pushed I would say that this to my mind is, if not the essence, at least a vital ingredient of any interaction.
…either consciously or unconsciously people influence the mood/state of the people they interact with. A state is addictive both in terms of you becoming locked in state and also association with somebody – with you wanting to be around her/her wanting to be around you all the time! Whenever you lead a girl somewhere, work her imagination by telling her a story or triggering a memory you are influencing her state etc. Leading her emotions… that’s all I meant. In developing myself I am trying to refine this skill set so a post on state influence within this context would be great!
Hi Craig,
I appreciate the clarification. To be honest, my entire style of pick-up is directed towards not doing anything consciously, so I don’t have any skillset as such that pertains to influencing a girl’s state. That’s not to say I don’t influence a girl’s state (and that she doesn’t influence mine), it’s just not a feature of the interaction that I’ve isolated, nor is it one that I would like to isolate. Gambler and Ben will probably be more helpful than I can.
Cheers,
Anthony P.
[...] my post The natural art of communication I described this art as interaction with another human being at the level of meaning. One way of [...]
Wow, Anthony, man, you come at this more in a philosophical perspective and makes tons of sense…You’ve really got this PUA thing bro…All natural, and no bullshit…I like it!…keep it up man…
peace and geta piece,
Chris