The Game

blanklyahead, his mouth closed, his jaw set, his sharp labret piercing angrily glinting in the cold afternoon light.
    The girls were looking at the menu of a sushi restaurant. They giggled. It was a beautiful sound. It was the sound of life. I hoped Mystery could hear it.

Mystery’s breakdown triggered a crisis of faith and self-examination in the community. We were all submerged so deep in the game that it was fucking with our lives.
    Papa was failing out of school. A San Francisco PUA named Adonis had been fired from his advertising job when they discovered how much time he’d been spending on Mystery’s Lounge. And my writing had come to a near-standstill. Even Vision had become so addicted to the seduction newsgroups that he gave his DSL cable to his roommate and ordered, “Don’t give these back to me for two weeks.”
    Meanwhile, the community was growing exponentially. More and more newbies were flocking to the boards. They were young kids—some of them still in high school—and they looked to us PUAs for advice on not just seduction and socializing but everything. They wanted to know what college to apply to; if they should stop taking prescribed psychiatric medication; if they should masturbate, wear condoms, do drugs, run away from home. They wanted to know what to read, think, and do to be like us.
    One of those lost souls was a short, well-muscled Lebanese student in his early twenties known as Prizer. He was from El Paso and had never even kissed a girl. He wanted advice on how to get comfortable around women, so we told him that first he needed to make female friends. And, second, he needed to experience sex, and not be too picky about a partner. He took us a little too literally.
    Witness a few choice excerpts from his field reports:

    MSN GROUP: Mystery’s Lounge
    SUBJECT: Field Report—Losing My Virginity in Juarez
    AUTHOR: Prizer

    I decided to see how it actually felt to have sex, so I crossed the border to Juarez. Since she was a hooker, I guess it’s not technically a pickup. But I think this will help my game because I’ll be less desperate. I had trouble keepinghard, except I got excited when I was going down on her and doing sixtynine. It was my first time for all of that. Now that I’m not a virgin, do you think girls will find me more attractive?

    MSN GROUP: Mystery’s Lounge
    SUBJECT: Field Report—Another Night in Juarez
    AUTHOR: Prizer

    I had sex again in Juarez. This makes four hookers for me now. She even swallowed my cum, but I still haven’t been able to ejaculate during intercourse. Is this normal? Anyway, what I did this time to help my game is I pretended like she was my girlfriend. But when I wanted to eat her ass out, she charged me an extra five bucks. That was lame. Anyway, I’m writing this report because I’m thinking that it might improve my sarging more if I spend my money on hookers in Juarez for maybe six months instead of on workshops and e-books and shit. It’s much more direct. Do you think that having more sex can raise your game and your confidence level?

    After everyone in the community chastised Prizer for posting field reports about prostitutes, he was the first to turn to me for help. Then came a note from Cityprc in Rhode Island. Then came pleas from a dozen others I’d never met. They were all offering me money to teach them seduction. They wanted to fly in; they wanted to fly me out; they were willing to pay any price just to watch a real PUA in action.
    With Mystery confined to the psychiatric wing of Humber Hospital and Juggler so deep in his LTR that he had taken down his website, the students were hungry. And somehow I had become their new guru. All those posts where I’d explained my routines and discussed my nights out hadn’t just been a way of learning and sharing; they’d also been a form of advertising.
    But seduction is a dark art. Its secrets come with a price and we were all paying it, whether in sanity, school, work, time, money, health, morality, or loss of self. We may have been supermen in the club, but on the inside we were rotting.
    “I was modeling myself after you and Mystery,” Papa said when I called to check on him. “I need to be me. I have so much potential for success, and I’m blowing it all. I used to be a straight A student.”
    He planned to go cold turkey on seduction and, for starters, cancel the seminars he’d already signed up for. “I’ll also stop calling HBs until I get my life in order,”