I once knew a guy that had an allergy to gluten (coeliac disease). He was always sick and even when he wasn’t was gaunt and sickly-looking. Once they determined that he had the coeliac problem, he took on a gluten-free diet and the effects were immediately noticeable. He then came up with the idea that the problem wasn’t that he had coeliac disease. He was unsure such a thing even really existed, believing that it was something the Medical Establishment (which he loathed) made up. It wasn’t a particularly well-formed theory, but nonetheless he decided that gluten was to blame for all that was wrong with the modern diet and most specifically obesity (he was not himself obese). He told this to a couple other people I know (well, he told this to everybody, but a couple people proved receptive). These people weren’t sick like the original guy, but they were overweight and decided that they would try a gluten-free diet. Sure enough, they lost weight!

Now, it’s possible that there is some sort of relationship between gluten and obesity, but I strongly suspect that the weight loss was attributable to the fact that gluten-free diets were at the time (and are now, though less so) really hard. They prevented you from eating out and from eating a lot of really tasty junk food as well as limiting carb-intake by way of fewer options. They took that out of the diet and they lost weight (until it proved more than they could handle and the weight came back). The gluten-free diet proved helpful by helping them do what they could have done by eating more common food in smaller quantities. It’s sort of like how I intentionally buy crackers that I like less because I will eat less of them. The crackers I buy are not, in and of themselves, weight-loss conducive. But they are insofar as they change my habits.

In other words, I think my friend was wrong about gluten, though his advice had the virtue of helping people lose weight (albeit temporarily) for other reasons.

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Long before I was introduced to a concept called Game, I had created something I called RAIN (or RAN) Theory. RAIN stood for Relationships As Implied Negotiation. It was based on the observation that my failures in the relationship realm mostly revolved around making myself too available to girls too early on. In other words, I was showing my hand before it was time and I was not demanding that she would meet me where I was before I would move to the next place. The theory expanded over time to improving my bookcover to better make women more interested in reading the book. In the end, I noticed that more than anything else, it was about finding ways to be more appealing, and less scary, to the opposite sex.

So when I first heard about Game, a large part of it rang true. The first variation of it I was introduced to was Doc Love and his System. Then Neil Strauss and Game proper, though by then I was less interested in such things. With the exception of some of the weirdness of Strauss, most of what I initially heard seemed true by the most important standard, which is that confirmed my existing biases. I still think that there is something to a lot of it in the most basic sense. Ferdinand Bardamu’s The Fundamentals of Game post, for example, seems extremely commonsensical. He breaks it down into seven components, all of which are important in some fashion or another. Should I ever be in the position of having to teach a son of mine about approaching women, I might use that very post.

The problem with Game, though, is that it often comes with a lot of baggage. And a good portion of its acolytes extrapolate these lessons the same thing that my friend extrapolated from Gluten-reduction. They found something successful (or claim to have, or have heard someone else claim to have), but often come up with reasons for its success that have more to do with confirming their (often very angry) biases rather than simply accepting the formula as something that can work. I am not calling out Bardamu on this. Though I disagree with him on a multitude of issues, his explanation of game is such a productive one I am not interested in hashing out the points of disagreement.

The great part about the system is that it can easily cure a very specific set of ills. Namely, what ailed me for the longest time. There are a lot of smart people that have poor feedback receptors. They obviously don’t know what they’re doing is not working, but don’t know why. I managed to figure out a lot of this stuff on my own because my feedback receptor is better than that of the average geek (I’ve noticed this most recently on job interviews, where I can tell if I am getting off-base really quickly). But a lot of people don’t. And so they can just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and never be able to isolate the problem. Further, these people often have limited exposure to girls and so they don’t get enough repetition to see their mistakes.

A problem with Game, as it is frequently discussed, is that its proponents often tend to fixate on a few aspects of it. Ferdinand, to his credit, manages to address the often (though not always) neglected aspects of it such as Presentability and Sociability. I know some guys that fit the first five to a tee and have no success because they completely and utterly fail on the last two.

So having it outlined is an extremely helpful thing. Perhaps the most important of the seven is Indifference because it’s Indifference that allows you to take the hits that come with asking girls out. When you ask out one girl a year, it’s (a) difficult to learn what you might be doing wrong and (b) inherently a big deal. If you can make it not a big deal, you can extend yourself more often without fear of being shot down. Not that you won’t be shot down, but you’ll be more likely to realize that in the end it is only as big a deal as you allow it to be. Calmness, another of the seven, is also helpful.

Insofar as Game is what Ferdinand describes it to be, I think it’s an extremely helpful thing for guys that have trouble with girls to consider. The main thing is that it seems to so rarely stop there. I think it’s one of those things that seems to commonsensical (when you think about it and have your “Eureka” moment) that people feel the need to extrapolate on it. And those extrapolations can lead to some pretty bad places made all the worse that the people that talk about it the most are often the people that have a history of failure and the bitterness that so often accompanies it. Folks like Roissy exploit this by playing to the dark aspects of the theories and making it so dark that the whole thing turns back on itself and the guy feels better about himself (or at least more Righteous) for not playing. For Roissy and his ilk, this is perfect because it becomes a loop of bitterness and self-righteousness.