The Game

said, clapping his hands together. He leaned in close, so the other guests in the hotel couldn’t hear.
    “My job here is to get you into the game,” he continued, making piercing eye contact with each of us. “I need to get what’s in my head into yours. Think of tonight as a video game. It is not real. Every time you do an approach, you are playing this game.”
    My heart began pounding violently. The thought of trying to start a conversation with a woman I didn’t know petrified me, especially with these guys watching and judging me. Bungee jumping and parachuting were a cakewalk compared to this.
    “All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up,” Mystery continued. “They are there to try to confuse you, so know right now that they cannot be trusted at all. You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It’s uncomfortable, but you ignore it. It’s not part of the equation.”
    I looked around; Extramask and Sweater seemed just as nervous as I was. “I need to teach you, in four days, the whole equation—the sequence ofmoves you need to win,” Mystery went on. “And you will have to play the game over and over to learn how to win. So get ready to fail.”
    Mystery paused to order a Sprite with five slices of lemon on the side, then told us his story. He spoke in a loud, clear voice—modeled, he said, on the motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. Everything about him seemed to be a conscious, rehearsed invention.
    Since the age of eleven, when he beat the secret to a card trick out of a classmate, Mystery’s goal in life was to become a celebrity magician, like David Copperfield. He spent years studying and practicing, and managed to parlay his talents into birthday parties, corporate gigs, and even a couple of talk shows. In the process, however, his social life suffered. At the age of twenty-one, when he was still a virgin, he decided to do something about it.
    “One of the world’s greatest mysteries is the mind of a woman,” he told us grandiosely. “So I set out to solve it.”
    He took a half hour bus ride into Toronto every day, going to bars, clothing stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. He wasn’t aware of the online community or any other pickup artists, so he was forced to work alone, relying on the one skill he did know: magic. It took him dozens of trips to the city before he even worked up the guts to talk to a stranger. From there, he tolerated failure, rejection, and embarrassment day and night until, piece by piece, he put together the puzzle that is social dynamics and discovered what he believed to be the patterns underlying all male-female relationships.
    “It took me ten years to discover this,” he said. “The basic format is FMAC—find, meet, attract, close. Believe it or not, the game is linear. A lot of people don’t know that.”
    For the next half hour, Mystery told us about what he called group theory. “I have done this specific set of events a bazillion times,” he said. “You do not walk up to a girl who’s all by herself. That is not the perfect seduction. Women of beauty are rarely found alone.”
    After approaching the group, he continued, the key is to ignore the woman you desire while winning over her friends—especially the men and anyone else likely to cockblock. If the target is attractive and used to men fawning all over her, the pickup artist must intrigue her by pretending to be unaffected by her charm. This is accomplished through the use of what he called a neg.
    Neither compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between—an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lowera woman’s self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her—by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks.
    “I don’t alienate ugly girls; I don’t alienate guys. I only alienate the girls I want to fuck,” Mystery lectured, eyes blazing with the conviction of his aphorisms. “If you don’t believe me, you will see it tonight. Tonight is the night of experiments. First, I am going to prove myself. You are going to watch me and then we are going to push you to try a few sets. Tomorrow, if you do what I say, you will be able to make out with a girl within fifteen minutes.”
    He looked at Extramask. “Name the five characteristics of an alpha male.”
    “Confidence?”
    “Right.