DISCLAIMER: This is not a piece against Game but just a description of the mechanisms and what they are the name of.

Have you ever noticed how some guys with personality disorders (e.g. narcissism or BPD) ended up having incredible success with girls, irrespective of where they were coming from?

They could be short, not in a great financial situation, and have no status, but they would be getting girls right, left and centre.

This has nothing to do with the typical recrimination from girls who have been bamboozled by some guy: "Oh, he was a narcissist", as they put everyone who wronged them in the same basket in their usual projection.

Essentially, narcissists are using people as disposable entities to quench that reliance on External Validation. It is fundamental to their emotional survival. They rely on others to prop up their fragile self-esteem and to fend off fears of abandonment and worthlessness.

The latter is what drives the dependency; despite their projection of the image of self-sufficiency or superiority, narcissistic people are terrified of being alone or abandoned.

This is what leads them to love bombing, creating an intense bond to keep the other person close, control the relationship, ensure they have the power to prevent being left behind and manipulate emotionally, through charm, dominance, or guilt, to keep the other person invested in the relationship.

It is not only about manipulation but also about their desperate need to find others to fill their emotional void. Showering someone with affection or attention helps ensure that the person stays engaged.

It temporarily reduces their anxiety about being abandoned, strengthens their control of the relationship, and makes them feel secure. However, it also feeds their fragile egos.

What eventually happens is that as they get too close, they feel vulnerable or exposed, and that is when they withdraw to avoid being hurt or rejected by preemptively abandoning the other person, to maintain the illusion of independence and superiority because the other person has stopped meeting their emotional needs, leading to devaluation.

This entertains the push-pull dynamic, keeping the other person uncertain and invested. They discard the person because they lack empathy, prioritising their emotional needs over the other person's feelings. They use this as a defence mechanism to avoid confronting feelings of unworthiness or rejection and to reassert control by ending the relationship on their terms, which protects their ego from feeling abandoned.

The dependency is fraught with tension because it clashes with their fear of vulnerability, intimacy, and rejection. This leads to toxic relationship dynamics: love-bombing + withdrawal + treating people as disposable.

Looking at Game, the parallels are uncanny when you look beyond the mechanisms.

1) Love Bombing (LB) and Demonstration of High Value (DHV)

DHV, like LB, is to gain admiration and establish dominance in the interaction, convincing the other person they are "winning" by being with them. Both use idealisation to hook the other person emotionally and make them feel unique or fortunate for the attention. Both are less about genuine care and more about securing control.

2) Push-Pull Dynamic - Negging / Hot & Cold Behaviour

Creating hot and cold behaviour destabilises the other person's confidence and makes them crave your approval. Alternating validation and slight rejection creates a perceived higher value, making the other person feel uncertain and eager to earn your attention. Both tactics create emotional dependency by destabilising the target's sense of security, keeping them on edge and invested in seeking approval.

3) Objectification of Others

Interactions are being gamified to the point where people are just robots responding positively to triggers and negatively to others. The goal is to score with a partner. Targets are often seen as challenges to conquer or trophies to win rather than as individuals with feelings. The emphasis is on achieving a desired outcome (e.g. sex, validation of their attractiveness or power) rather than building a meaningful connection.

Both approaches reduce people to means to an end, prioritising self-serving goals over a mutual connection or empathy.

4) Fear of Vulnerability

Game teaches you to avoid emotional vulnerability in their interactions, maintaining an aura of detachment or indifference. It focuses on dominance and power dynamics, steering clear of revealing insecurities or needs.

Narcissists and Game Guys both have an aversion to emotional intimacy, relying on control, manipulation, and surface-level charm to navigate relationships without exposing more profound vulnerabilities. They are right because it is incredibly off-putting to women.

5) Creating Dependency

Game is about eliciting strong emotional responses (positive or negative) to create an intense and memorable connection. This dependency is often built on the manipulation of emotions, using techniques to make the targets feel euphoric one moment and uncertain the next. The instability creates emotional addiction, as the target becomes fixated on regaining your attention or approval.

Both rely on emotional manipulation to foster a sense of dependency, ensuring the other person remains engaged and invested.

It prioritises self-serving goals and outcomes, often leaving the other person feeling used, devalued, or discarded once their purpose has been fulfilled.

Essentially, people with NPD are overt narcissists, and highly invested Game Guys without innate personality disorders are emulating covert narcissists when they don't gradually become them.

When Narcissists openly demand validation and admiration, the love bombing and control tactics are direct and obvious. In contrast, covert narcissists will use indirect (DHV) methods to achieve their goals without appearing domineering or egotistical.

Communication of overt narcissists:

Grandstanding / Compliments Showering/ Aggression

Communication of covert narcissists:

Guilt-tripping / Victim playing / Passive Aggressiveness / Negging or Needling

While overt narcissists seek admiration and dominance, covert narcissists hide their need for validation and control. The former is draining but obvious, but the covert is confusing and destabilising.

Essentially, when one goes down the rabbit hole of Game as a subject and embodies the teachings of the subject, he moulds himself to the covert narcissist handbook.

It is not a criticism. The reality is that women respond to narcissism because their nature is inherently narcissistic. Through the surface-level masquerading of more strength through more narcissism, where women get beaten at their own game through the trauma bonding process, the dynamic eventually breaks the foundation of relationships, as the emotional wear and tear of going from one extreme to the next takes its toll on the people involved.

Narcissism as Game operates under the female frame and applies successful mechanisms from a bottom-up approach without understanding the top-down perspective. This only fails because of the necessary polarisation between the genders, as both individuals are stuck in a destructive codependency setup through the equalisation of their respective positions by the man lowering himself to her level. That is what Game does, in essence, by mirroring and adopting women's triggers.

The covert narcissist is essentially feigning to show his true self, where Game is a plaster in the short term for low-key inherent female placating.

Both he and the woman are bitches, through the replication of mechanisms which work but which are there to only please the woman and not the male because women cannot do wrong as he initially needs to feel fulfilled. The male justifies the methods because he will be rewarded by the law of averages over a long enough timeline using this rationalisation.

The illusion can last long enough until the lay. Still, when power dynamics cannot be concealed long enough once in a relationship, the illusion created through the initially displayed frame fritters away. What she thought was originally strength is gradually shown to be disguised insecurity. This is if the covert narcissist Game Guy falls for a girl who is not too bad a person. She will chew him if he falls for a real Cluster B one because the copy is never as good as the original.

As said, this is not a criticism or a value judgment of Game. It works for a reason. It is essentially the rules of engagement for dealing with women who reward such behaviours because it speaks to their internal locus, no matter what they say.

The trap men who are so stuck in the Game are that they will confuse abundance with dependence. So stuck in techniques, not understanding that on a long enough timeline, the feigned disinterest that one can become expert at displaying to secure whatever short-term gratification he seeks will be laid bare once in a relationship, and the masquerade will end. In the process, he will become an expert at gaslighting others and himself, the former enabling the latter. He will have bought the Covert Narcissist Kool-Aid, and until he hits rock bottom, his defence mechanisms will help him reframe what is conducive to the positive outcomes he is after.

It all goes back to who wants the relationship and sex the most, but for real, not the fool's game of perception, which Game is excellent at displaying, where people will confuse it with reality at first. Quality eventually gets discovered. You have One-Hit Wonders, and you have Household Names.

Typically, doing or applying game methods consciously or unconsciously (through repeated practice) involves low-key co-opting the woman's agenda while fooling ourselves into thinking we have agency as men. In reality, we are just placating indirectly. This eventually shows up once the simping starts in the relationship, when it is not the betatisation or the approval-seeking.

Even with Dread, when used to trigger a reaction in the woman instead of just being a byproduct of one's priorities being above the woman's, it won't work over the long run. Solving a problem through tactics misses the point that the man is the problem because he created the situation he is trying to solve.

E.g. "She is behaving like a bitch, so I am going to dread her". In the vast majority of cases, she behaved like a bitch because you did too previously, and you are using a technique when you are not looking internally at what triggered that behaviour, and you won't need to dread her.

The reason why so many guys find themselves in such setups is that through the conditioning, whether it is the mainstream, academic rationalising of "female nature", Game tolerance toward the female BS for scoring, it is reinforcing these permissive behaviours that we are seeing currently.

It is easier to lie to oneself; the narcissist's inherent self-loathing and the internal deflection he makes is a better payoff than any potential benefit he would derive from curing his narcissism, because addressing it would require him to access his feelings of self-loathing to deal with them. Women are often victims of the same behaviour in their inherent narcissistic nature. They never take accountability, shift the blame, and gaslight themselves and others so they cannot be made to feel wrong. Before one of them seeks help, they must hit rock bottom, where previous self-defence mechanisms no longer work.

Game Guys intellectualise and rationalise away bad behaviour by women using evolutionary psychology. They have the right to act like bitches, because evolution makes them that way. They have more to lose by getting pregnant, and they have more people approaching them than guys do, so they have to act like bitches when they reject you. Women need a protector, so they have to shit-test. Shitty treatment and childish behaviour should be what you seek, it is natural if they do, and if they don't, it is a red flag, so it is up to you to find it and overcome it. This creates a set-up where if it is not hard, it is not worth it, funnily enough, emphasising, even more, the self-loathing they subconsciously deny, concomitantly using their sense of competitiveness to feel validated in the success of the pursuit.

They have to tolerate when a woman is giving them shit while they are hitting on her. Or act unfazed or unreactive when a girl tries to insult them. Not because they really plan to leave and don't care, but because they want to turn her on by seeming alpha and get their approval. They are pretending to punish her to turn her on, but it is not really a punishment if it is being done to turn her on. It is giving her what she wants. They are rewarding bad behaviour. They are just being alpha enough to sexually turn her on while simultaneously acting codependent enough on a subtle level to satisfy her Cluster B tendencies. What they don't get is that no matter how many times they "punish" her, the moment they try to close the deal by getting laid by her, they are given the ultimate reward, which is flattering sexual attention. She may, at that point, give you the sex, or she may withhold it, but either way, the attention whore dama queen wins.

Understanding Narcissism is about understanding Game and vice versa. It is good to know what works, but understand what you are involved in, as both are intertwined. Tricks, tactics and mechanisms are great in the short run. Still, they can make you eventually lose sight of who you are in the long run should you delve deep into what deep rationalisation you will make because the outcome you are so desperately seeking despite your best efforts of not appearing as such is what is eventually going to screw you.

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