That’s how I ultimately read the book-the tactics were about starting conversations with people you had no business talking to. The Dark Side of Saying Work Is ‘Like a Family’ Joe Pinsker And what the hell is that even supposed to mean?” If, however, you say something like, “Those shoes look really comfortable,” you may have started a conversation, even if the response is, “They’re not. If you tell a girl she’s busted, you are a jerk. This is a subtle thing, and it’s not the same as being bluntly mean. Another tactic, one for which The Game became particularly famous, was the art of “negging”-that is, giving a woman a semi-insulting compliment so that you a) distinguish yourself from the pack of people she’s accustomed to have hitting on her, and b) slightly lower her self-esteem to the point that she wants your approval and is vulnerable to your advances. It seemed like dangerous stuff, in that it might actually work. (The cube represents the woman’s ego or something-so if it’s big, it means she’s self-confident if it’s transparent as opposed to opaque that means she’s open as opposed to guarded if it’s pink that means she’s bright and energetic … basic non-falsifiable horoscope-type material she can read herself into and then find you perceptive.) It was basically a way to harness people’s love of talking about themselves in order to score.

student named Jon had mentioned The Game, and was demonstrating how it worked by means of “The Cube” routine, where you ask a woman to imagine a box standing in the desert, and you tell her about herself based on how she describes it. When Neil Strauss’s blockbuster book about pickup artistry came out a decade ago, I was a Midwestern ingenue in New York City, and I read it mostly as a defensive measure.

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