Revisiting the Definition of “Game”

Jack and I have been conversing about this some more. Maybe this will clarify: Game is roughly equivalent to charisma. You can abuse your charms or you can use them help people listen to your message. You are born with a certain amount of charisma, and you can enhance that inheritance. Some people mistake the word “Game” for “gaming someone” in the sense of manipulation. In the wider manhood community of blogging, the word “game” appears in both senses and it’s confusing.

As I use the term “game” in this context, it arises from the concept of “game theory.” Game theory is a mindset, an approach gamer geeks use to beat gaming software (AKA RPGs = role playing games). The various games offer virtual worlds and there is a more or less scientific approach to learning how that virtual world is designed. Once you understand it, you can go back through the game and play proficiently and collect the various rewards. You can game the game by using game theory. Do you sense we need more words here to distinguish the various meanings of “game”?

There is a very influential fellow out there who used to work in the game software business, someone very intelligent who just happened to have a very strong social instinct. He goes by the name Vox Day and you can look him up in any search engine. Be aware that Google and friends, under the guidance of the SJW agenda, will try to keep you away from Vox himself, and likely offer links only to stuff that criticizes Vox. SJWs hate Vox, and he returns the favor quite vocally.

Vox explored dating from a gamer’s viewpoint of testing how women reacted, as if they were features of a virtual world in a game. Not a very nice view of women, some say, but it had the effect of reducing the crazy cultural mythology to a manageable level of testing and verification of what was written into the game code, as it were. Some games will play games with your head, you see. He discovered that the women he encountered seldom reacted as they themselves claimed. Women were quite unaware of their own motives and desires, as he saw it. Sadly, a great many men in society are also deceived by the same batch of lies. Treating dating as an RPG, he realized there was a whole lot of mythology that ensnared both men and women.

He organized his thinking about this and published it as his “Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response.” He wasn’t alone in his analysis, but his presentation of what he learned got a lot more attention than other men with similar knowledge. That’s because he was already deeply involved in publishing his thoughts on a lot of other things. I already noted he was involved in gaming software, and had published a lot of reviews in commercial publications. He got paid for it. He also wrote a lot about politics and economics, which is related to his graduate degree, and he garnered much fame on that stuff. And naturally some of what he wrote was commentary on culture and social trends.

So when he started revealing his research into Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response, it got the same level of attention. The reaction was very strong, as you might expect, because he consistently says that women suffer from a lot of socially enforced mythology. In my assessment, most of what he says about such things overlaps with what the Bible says, in that the feminist agenda is a lie of the Devil.

But other men have written on the subject, and Vox has promoted or disputed with them publicly, and there arose a very large community of men discussing this whole thing. The debate itself brought the whole topic into some prominence on the Internet. Some of these men cared only for sating their degraded lusts, but at least their assumptions about feminine nature was accurate, against the social mythology of feminism. These men scored well in their flesh game because they ignored the propaganda. They had a strong “game.” But there are even more men interested in making their marriages better, and the marriages of others. They used this lore to build a strong open communication between men and women. Quite a few women have absorbed this lore and write their own blogs about gaming men, or more often, making their marriages better.

As confusing as all this use and abuse of the word “game” can be, I doubt I can simply use the term “charisma” as a blanket replacement. Way too many people have funny ideas about the meaning that word, too. The best I can do is make a reasonable effort to put them both in a useful context and try to explain what I see as the hand of God working in our lives. I don’t mind taking the time to explain my approach, and I won’t hesitate to shut down people who offer silly arguments over semantics. You believe what you want, but I know what my God demands of me, and that’s what I write about.