I have the impression that “game” is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications (“phone game,” “day game,” etc.). But I’m sure you’ve seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I’ll defer to your opinion.
That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally bad in this regard. While the prevailing respectable views and popular wisdom on the matters of human pairing and sexual behavior have always been affected by biases in every culture that ever existed, my impression is that ours is exceptionally out of touch with reality when it comes to these issues. This is a special case of what I see as a much broader general trend—namely, that in contrast to hard sciences and technology, which have been making continuous and uninterrupted progress for centuries, in many areas of human interest that are not amenable to a no-nonsense hard-scientific way of filtering truth from bullshit, the dominant views have actually been drifting away from reality and into increasing biases and delusions for quite a while now.
To understand this, it is necessary to be able to completely decouple normative from factual parts in one’s beliefs about human sexual and pairing behaviors—a feat of unbiased thinking that is harder in this matter than almost any other. Once this has been done, however, a curious pattern emerges: modern people perceive the normative beliefs of old times and faraway cultures about pairing and sex as alien, strange, and repulsive, and conclude that this is because their factual beliefs were (or are) deluded and biased. Yet it seems to me that whatever one thinks about the normative part, the prevailing factual beliefs have, in many ways, become more remote from reality in modern times. (The only major exceptions are those that came from pure hard-scientific insight, like e.g. the details of women’s fertility cycle.) This of course also implies that while one can defend the modern norms on deontological grounds, the commonly believed consequentialist arguments in their favor are very seriously flawed.
The PUA insights are to a large degree about overcoming these relatively novel biases, and most PUA acolytes aren’t aware that lots of their newly gained taboo-breaking insight was in fact common knowledge not that long ago. When you look at men who have applied this insight to achieve old-fashioned pleasant monogamous harmony rather than for sarging, like that guy to whose marriage story I linked earlier, it’s impossible not to notice that it’s basically the same way our ancestors used to keep peace in the house.
I have the impression that “game” is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications (“phone game,” “day game,” etc.). But I’m sure you’ve seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I’ll defer to your opinion.
That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally bad in this regard. While the prevailing respectable views and popular wisdom on the matters of human pairing and sexual behavior have always been affected by biases in every culture that ever existed, my impression is that ours is exceptionally out of touch with reality when it comes to these issues. This is a special case of what I see as a much broader general trend—namely, that in contrast to hard sciences and technology, which have been making continuous and uninterrupted progress for centuries, in many areas of human interest that are not amenable to a no-nonsense hard-scientific way of filtering truth from bullshit, the dominant views have actually been drifting away from reality and into increasing biases and delusions for quite a while now.
To understand this, it is necessary to be able to completely decouple normative from factual parts in one’s beliefs about human sexual and pairing behaviors—a feat of unbiased thinking that is harder in this matter than almost any other. Once this has been done, however, a curious pattern emerges: modern people perceive the normative beliefs of old times and faraway cultures about pairing and sex as alien, strange, and repulsive, and conclude that this is because their factual beliefs were (or are) deluded and biased. Yet it seems to me that whatever one thinks about the normative part, the prevailing factual beliefs have, in many ways, become more remote from reality in modern times. (The only major exceptions are those that came from pure hard-scientific insight, like e.g. the details of women’s fertility cycle.) This of course also implies that while one can defend the modern norms on deontological grounds, the commonly believed consequentialist arguments in their favor are very seriously flawed.
The PUA insights are to a large degree about overcoming these relatively novel biases, and most PUA acolytes aren’t aware that lots of their newly gained taboo-breaking insight was in fact common knowledge not that long ago. When you look at men who have applied this insight to achieve old-fashioned pleasant monogamous harmony rather than for sarging, like that guy to whose marriage story I linked earlier, it’s impossible not to notice that it’s basically the same way our ancestors used to keep peace in the house.