The Game Is Stacked

The Village Voice reports that New York women are wising up to the strategies outlined in Neil Strauss’ The Game:

“It was Saturday night, we had just had sex,” recalls Caitlin, a 22-year-old private tutor living on the Upper West Side. “I went into the bathroom. He had, of course, stacks of The New Yorker and some other random books. Underneath the New Yorkers, I saw what I thought was the Bible. And the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh my God, he has the Bible in the bathroom.’ But it was The Game, the picking-up-girls book. So I flipped through it a little bit.”Five minutes in, Caitlin felt like she was reading a script of her night so far: Apparently, she’d been negged, cubed, kino’d, then f-closed by a PUA. She stormed out the bathroom, book in hand. “He sort of didn’t want to discuss it.”

A neg is a backhanded compliment; the cube is a sleazy “interactive demonstration of value” routine; kino is short for kinesthesia, i.e., physical contact; f-close is sex. That leaves PUA: pickup artist.

. . .

Ask anyone: The nice guy loses; the jerk gets the girl. Since last September, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (Regan/Harper Collins) has broken down this truism to a foolproof science.

Softbound in black faux leather to resemble the Bible, The Game reveals the field-tested lines and techniques Strauss learned during the year and change he spent interacting with the world’s finest pickup artists, leading “sarging” missions (wherein AFCs, “average frustrated chumps,” practice their moves at bars on unsuspecting women), and eventually living with a few PUAs in a Los Angeles mansion they called Project Hollywood. Clearly explained, the book’s tricks are easy to learn and deploy, and quietly devastating in their success.

Like an oversaturated multi-level marketing system, Players must now adapt to a post-Game world:

At 151, a Lower East Side bar that’s seen The Game manifest itself in all too many ways, from plastic firemen’s hats to amateur hypnosis, I met Steve Lucien, DC, and Vic, three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. for the weekend. Under the pretense of visiting friends on the East Coast, the three really had come into the city because, as Strauss writes at the end of The Game, L.A. is completely sarged out. They want to investigate New York.

With them they brought new methods—they were updating the Game to give old tricks new life. Recently Lucien had been doing something you could call Reverse Game, in which he frames his Game-driven advances as friendly warnings about Game-driven jerks:

“Hey, there’s some weird shit happening in this bar,” Lucien will say. “These guys are just coming up and saying really weird shit to women—something about an eagle? Then they’re mean to you. It’s sick!”

“Oh I know what you’re talking about! That book!”

“Yeah, you won’t believe this stuff. Like watch, pretend I’m one of those dudes who read the book. Do you wanna kiss me?”

Update: As Voice editors explain and the writer himself now admits, key parts of the story — and especially this last excerpt — were fabricated, Jayson Blair-like, which is too bad, because I really, really want to believe it happened.

Writer Sylvester’s confession:

I did not meet Steve Lookner in New York at Bar 151. The trip and my encounter with him, DC, and Vali did not happen as I reported, or at all. The scene was a composite of specific anecdotes shared to me primarily by the two other parties, DC and Vali; Lookner did not share or take part in these anecdotes either. I deeply regret this misinformation, and I apologize to Lookner for his distress, which I certainly never intended.