Review of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

About a week ago, I was browsing through amazon.co.jp and trying random words. Now we all know amazon - and Google, for that matter, - try to get inside our brains and offer us stuff we'd never heard about, but that we just might like. That's how I found a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

I was never interested in Pickup, having that associated with art, even in a questionable way, got me to buy that book. And I don't regret it one bit.

One of the things that make me write is the fact that, while you're reading me, you're basically in my reality, inside my head. You may not agree. Heck, you may not even like it, but there's something absolutely amazing and awful about the possibility. You can get into someone's life without having to go through the trouble of actually doing anything. I'm not talking about a way to dodge laziness, but about a way to do all sorts of nasty deeds without even feeling remorseful about it. I can just open a book and my mind could be examining the best and the worst of humanity in a split second.

If you think I'm full of crap, try Henry Miller. Can't go wrong with Miller.

The Game was written by Neil Strauss, which I'm sorry to say is not Henry Miller. Nonetheless his writing, and that includes his theme of choice: pickup artists (or PUA), kept me hooked to that book until I'd read it to the end.

At first, I wasn't really worried whether the openers and routines really worked. I never asked the crucial question of "does this really work"? Basically, because I knew it eventually would. I wanted to see these people actually getting what they want through their "Social Dynamics" approach, sure, but I was reading so rampantly just because I wanted to know how they would end up. Having an internet community (or secret society, if you will) growing from scratch is something that even Mr. Seth Godin would find admirable. I mean, this is what he was talking about in his book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.
In short...

Did I like it? I loved reading The Game.

Does it work? Like a charm.

Is that a bad thing? Most likely, yes.

It took me three days to go through the 400 or so pages of The Game, and I was only reading on my scarce free time. It was a lot of fun, and I'd rather give this credit to Neil Strauss, the man himself, than to simply throw it all at a bunch of PUA-wannabe-AFCs. That's another very cool thing about this book: the acronyms, the secret lingo. In case you're still wondering, PUA means pickup artist and AFC would be average frustated chump.

In my opinion, you don't have to buy into the subculture of PUAs to buy the book, because it's really well written.