I’m walking through the airport lounge waiting for JJ to buy some proper luggage when I happen past the cosmetics section of duty free. There’s the usual grotty painted-up harlots hawking their wares stood infront of posters of model’s faces that are more like oil paintings than photos.

It strikes me how disconnected from the reality of actual beauty is the beauty industry. There’s no escaping the fact that men decide what is beautiful in women (and vice versa). Slogans feeding unearned entitlement (“you deserve it”) or fantasy anti-ageing (“advanced night repair formula”) are emblazoned upon essentially generic creams, gels and facepaints.

A mannish-chinned oil painting

I think of how many models I’ve dated who look sensational in portfolio pictures, easily hotter than these Estee Lauder models, but are thoroughly unremarkable in the flesh. There’s the fashion model I threesomed, the catwalk model who fell in love with me, and recently the Victoria Secrets model I instant-dated (but didn’t bang). Every one of them a stunner on paper and merely “pretty hot” in person. Make-up works.

In Thailand I was struck by how well scrawny little girls doll up. I don’t mean to belittle the little chipmunks because they are doing what comes naturally and I am a firm supporter of their being more well-presented women in the world. Here’s a case in point.

With and without makeup

This young girl is a fresh graduate I dated a couple of times last month. A sweet pleasant good girl (I can just hear all the loser farang trying to find a way to pass her off as a freelancer looking to feed her family back in the village. They need to believe good girls don’t exist in Thailand to justify them not finding any). When dolled up she’s encroaching upon eight territory. But just look at the change when she’s gone au-naturel and an unflattering photo.

The reality is she’s somewhere in the mid-seven range. Good skin, slim, limber, with charming features and a lovely manner. This was our second date. Give me that over a hoity-toity model any day of the week.

I believe Game is a journey, one in which you initially stumble blindly unaware of where the starting line is. You go from the blissfully-unaware AFC to suddenly peeking under the curtain and realising that success with women is a skill that can be learned like any other, and there is a vast wealth of resources available to help you. Many men (such as myself) believe they’ve found the starting line and off they go.

The problem is, you’re not running down the yellow brick road, you’re just spinning on a sophisticated hamster wheel and getting nowhere fast. Eventually, if you’re lucky and have access to the right resources, you’ll tumble to the old saw that the pickup community is just the self-help community in disguise. That should motivate you to fix the real causes of your self-worth problems and personality defects rather than the symptoms (“I can’t get laid”).

Project Hollywood, yesterday

Some people never make that leap. They persist in an never-ending cycle of diminishing returns in the quest to perfect their Game. Just do another 1,000 sets. Just polish off that routine. Just read more Game books. They become shameless pussy-hounds craving the pop of the next sexual conquest. They pour ever more water into the leaky bucket. I’ve discussed this in detail in my Creeping Death posts.

Well, while I may be a narcissist I am not unable to recognise when someone hits the nail on the head more accurately than I do. The Rawness has just written a masterpiece. Read it. I’ll pull out the sections that interest me most and comment.

His fundamental point is that Game (or more specifically the PUA lifestyle) can worsen a man’s self-worth issues by misleading him to attack the symptoms of his issues while the causes continue to worsen. The PUA lifestyle and the type of Game it encourages will exacerbate the problem by screening good people out of your life while attracting bad people. At some point it comes crashing down.

The PUA-HB dynamic is that of a codependent-narcissist. As an AFC people-pleaser you employ ineffective manipulative Nice Guy behaviours to get girls. Game replaces these with effective manipulative Asshole/Alpha behaviours that draw you into the dance of wounded souls. The PUA becomes a Compensatory Narcissist in that he models and copies the actions of a true narcissist (e.g. aloofness, assholery) without feeling it in his core. This leads to three types of interaction

• PUA-(victim)HB: The player manipulates and exploits low self-worth codependent women who need him to lean on, primarily by teasing and withholding validation through push-pull. He despises the weakness of these women and tires of them.
• PUA-(predator)HB: The player meets a more skilled narcissist than himself and is drawn into her web of tests, in which his increasing competence of passing intrigues her and gives her narcissistic supply until eventually she tires of him and dumps him, usually before sex.
• PUA-(normal)HB: The girl isn’t responsive to his games because she is not unusually needy of validation or narcissistic supply. By his refusal to be normal, she is exasperated by him and tired while for his part he finds she is not responding as his script dictates so he becomes frustrated. The relationship never progresses and thus he blows his chance to have a nice person in his life.

Thus the PUA is gradually channelled into a lifestyle that involves gamey dances with a subset of emotionally damaged women as he tries to extract sex and affection from her while she tries to extract attention and validation from him. Rarely does a balanced mutually-affirming sexual relationship ensue. This is the case whether the PUA is angling for SNLs in nightclubs or bouncebacks in street game. I know guys commited to both lifestyles. It’s not pretty. Rawness calls such men grandiosity sharks.

“grandiosity sharks are people who have to keep swimming through a sea of external validation in order to breathe and stay afloat, because much like the shark can’t breathe internally, they can’t generate validation and self-esteem internally. If they stop moving through the sea of validation for a given amount of time, or their swimming is temporarily disrupted due to a blow to their ego, they figuratively suffocate, sink to the bottom and die.”

It would be nice if the pussy-hound lifestyle was merely papering over the cracks of self-worth but Rawness suggests it’s more like swallowing the cat to catch the mouse:

“Pickup artistry does not fix the codependent; it just changes him from a codependent into a narcissist by ignoring the core issues and instead training him to switch from the faulty coping strategy of surrender to the preferred faulty coping strategy of the narcissist, which is overcompensation. It’s just trading one toxic personality dysfunction for a worse, harder-to-cure toxic personality dysfunction.”

I have spoken before about what I termed the two types of Game – light side and dark side. It springs from the matrix of male/female personality types. Recall that there are four types of man according to their combination of competence and confidence:

• Type 1: Both confident and competent. These are the solid self-actualised males who have their life together, have genuine skills they employ, balanced personalities and a sense of direction. It’s George Clooney or Cary Grant.
• Type 2: Confident but incompetent. These are the chancers and showboats in life who usually drift aimlessly but maintain the veneer of charm and charisma (because real confidence can never be delusional, it must rest upon competence) and have an exaggerated narcissistic self-regard. They are the tattooed bar tenders, rock guitarists and drug dealers of the world.
• Type 3: Competent but lacking confidence. This is the vast sea of beta males who hold down steady office jobs, watch Lost and Prison Break, dress in GAP or Next and are utterly indistinguishable from each other (to the female eye). Generally they are decent people and it’s their taxes that support the femo-centric world.
• Type 4: Neither competent nor confident. They are the dregs of society. Barely-employed, out of shape, lacking social skills, these are the omega / delta males whom society has left behind. They retreat into solo hobbies or fringe weirdo collectives (e.g. ComicCon).

The female typology is based on beauty and self esteem. So type 1 women have both, type 2 women have beauty but low self esteem. I made the point that in the normal order of affairs men and women of equal rank pair off, i.e. type 1 men pair with type 1 women. A pairing of one rank’s mismatch (e.g. type 1 man with type 2 woman) can initiate but is doomed to failure. A two-rank disparity would only happen if there were severe outside influence such as drugs, alcohol or a solemn obligation to a dear friend.

Where this intersects with the Rawness essay is that he is essentially talking about Type 2 Male – Type 2 Female pairings where the man’s fragile confidence is manufactured by painting a faux-narcissistic facade over a codependent core and the competence issues are not addressed either. The female is leveraging her beauty but lacks a sense of deservedness and thus has a constant lean-towards that the PUA can exploit by using push-pull to prop her up with validation / attention and then take away to send her back off balance.

To say these pairings are unhealthy is an understatement. Rawness also nicely explains the PUA obsession with strippers and hired guns:

“By the way, I want to point out that stripping and sex work in general are profession that attracts a HUGELY disproprortionate amount of narcissists and borderline personality disorder sufferers, which lends credence to my theory that becoming a PUA often just makes one into a sophisticated form of codependent, because why else would these guys keep being drawn to strippers and pornstars, who can be some of the most severely personality-disordered people out there?”

I have long maintained that the successful attitude towards learning Game, the actual starting line you should begin your journey from, is to develop yourself into a Type 1 man (Rawness calls this the Renaissance Man rather than Alpha) and then learn how to identify and attract Type 1 women using Game which is merely a conduit of your character and leveraging your understanding of female psychology and the mating ritual. You should avoid the Type 2 / Type 2 dance of the wounded souls. The only way to win that game is to avoid playing.

I might come back to his piece with more comments. It really is a blinder and I urge you to read it.

A beta male believes women are the prize whereas the man must simply try his best then hope for the best. This is a qualifying frame of mind. It encourages the man to act up in showy ways to prove he’s good enough for the princess’s delectation. Watch the men around you and they are positively dripping in attempts to qualify, some obvious, some less so. For example:

• “I studied hard at school, worked hard, and now I have a six-figure salary and minor status increments within my corporate hierarchy” I can provide for you
• “I read men’s fashion magazines and choose expensive clothes that are in season” I can look good for you
• “I work out at the gym and deny myself many pleasures in food and alcohol so that I can have a stacked body” I can protect you

These are not in themselves bad things, they are merely the mark of a higher beta – the man who has the same beta heart as every other male but he does the beta thing with more drive, passion and competence than the others. Head nerd. Higher betas do get laid, just not as much as they’d expect from the vast amount of sacrifice they endure. If I had a daughter, I’d encourage her to marry a higher beta.

ye olde chode hop, yesteryear

Zooming in from the life-time trajectory qualification towards the in-a-bar-at-night qualification we get the curious case that here at RSG we call the “chode hop“. It goes like this:

• Man is standing motionless by himself or on fringes of his group, value scanning the room for girls
• Girl somewhere gives him a scrap of attention such as a quick glance or walks near him
• Man immediately breaks out into awkward bopping dance out of time to the music
• Girl is no longer noticing him
• Man immediately stops dancing and takes a slug of his beer to smooth out the awkwardness

You will see this so often in so many bars. Somestimes its just a subtle bobbing head and side-stepping feet, other times its full-on like the tool in the above video. Before long you can predict it and give a 3…2…1…. countdown. On a more abstract level the chode hop encompasses all short-form qualification displays from men that are reactive to a woman’s fleeting attention and which end as soon as the attention has gone.

It is awful qualifying behaviour. If in doubt, stay still.

I’ll admit it. I’m greedy.

When I released Daygame Nitro in May of last year it was the only daygame book worth reading. It’s still the best, but I’m a narcissist so you’d expect me to say that. My book is aimed at guys who can already do a bit of game and thus dives straight into the advanced material. Other guys cater to beginners and that’s fine. I devoted one chapter to “beginners daygame” and no more.

Perfection, yesterday

My method is designed to get girls who are younger and hotter than you are, then make them fall for you hard. That’s not an easy task. It requires real technical nous and an unshakeably strong frame. Daygame Nitro explains precisely how to acquire it. This is the most technically deep daygame material there is.

Everything is laid out in specifics. I use sample openers, sample stacks, sample conversations. I then explain the principles behind them so you can create your own on the fly. Combine this book with the dozens of free videos already on my blog and you have all you need to start knobbing hot young fillies.

That’s why for it’s first year of release I set the bar high at $70. If you’re serious about getting good, serious about putting in hundreds of approaches, then $70 is a pittance.

My loot

So for a year I’ve counted my loot and sat atop my pile of gold, cackling madly. Perhaps it’s to restore my karma, perhaps it’s a moment of madness but now I’ve cut my prices and even, in my boundless magnificence, released a cheap paperback edition. The content remains exactly the same. So, dear readers I offer you two choices:

Daygame Nitro Hardback – $50

Daygame Nitro Paperback – $20

Knock yourselves out. This won’t last forever.

I was browsing Yohami’s blog this evening and saw he’d scored himself on a Narcissism Quiz. Sounds good to me, let’s give it a try….

Jesus fucking Christ am I that full of myself????? Brilliant. That’s one third of the Dark Triad sorted. Now I need to work on my psychopathy and Machiavellianism

I think we are all quite aware of the societal pressure to date women our own age. Up until you graduate university this makes sense because you are surrounded by your same age-cohort and that’s when girls are in their prime. But as soon as you enter the real world where you have to make all your opportunities, there’s simply no reason to limit yourself like that. Let the over-the-hill feminists scream and wail that they “feel more beautiful at 35” and they “know what they want”. I too know what I want – freshly bloomed girls of 20yrs old. As men we are shamed into dating horrible old women.

This video clip is a great pisstake of it. It begins as a shaming video then quickly turns it around for laughs.

It’s like if the Men’s Right’s Movement met in a pub for a quick drink. Lots of talk about manly things and girls aren’t allowed in the treehouse. When PUA Man comes in they shame him for chasing skirt… and then on the faintest whiff of pussy they are cutting each other’s throats for a shot. A mature man should be solid in his reality, with an unshakeable frame. No little dollybird should be able to lure him off-kilter.

A mature man on-kilter, yesterday

The number of times I’ve seen a young bird place herself into a group of men and immediately become the centre of fawning attention…… ugh.

You should constantly hammer away at a girl’s frame in order to impose your own. The strongest reality wins. This doesn’t mean you have to constantly actively do stuff (DHV stories, negs etc) but you do have to constantly hold your own frame while her’s crumbles. Have you ever been in a party / dinner full of strong characters who feel entirely comfortable in the environment whereas everybody and everything is new to you? If so, you probably felt it was an uphill struggle just to be yourself and prevent their frame from overwhelming you. Every minute is a slog and its easy just to surrender your frame, unburden yourself from the responsibility of holding the line, and then you can actually relax.

Obviously the girls in your life feel the same way and yet, even better, they are designed to gratefully surrender their frame to yours once they’ve tested yours. So just hold your frame safe in the knowledge her’s has inbuilt structural weaknesses and is built to fail.

One way of chipping into her frame is to constantly position her below you, as having certain characteristics. Keep putting her in that box, let her qualify her way out of it, dole out a reward, and then put her right back into the box. Eventually she’ll tire of climbing out and will sit wherever you figuratively put her. You should make the whole process playful so she enjoys it.

Here are two great examples to use when she’s on facebook or sitting next to you at a laptop in isolation. They put the girl in the following box:

• Clumsy
• Attention-seeking
• Cute
• Tolerated by the adults because she’s well-meaning at heart

In both cases it’s good to bait the trap first by getting her to qualify on some (initially) positive personality trait such as independence, chattiness, athleticism etc then you hit her with “You know who you remind me of? There’s a children’s TV character just like you, who is also [independent, chatty, athletic etc]”

You’ll have also seen there’s alot of “our world” shared joke opportunities in this. If you couldn’t figure out which character is the girl, you ought to unsubscribe from this blog.

* This is my 400th post. Fuckin’ hell I’m good to you people *

Five or so years ago Adam Lyons made a big name for himself proferring a new type of game system called Project Entourage. The best-case scenario looks like this:

1. Arrange with nightclub managers to have a guest list you can add names to. Pick one of the beta-wallet-emptying pretentious clubs around the West End such as Movida, China White, Mahiki etc which charge men £20 entry and girls free before 11pm. For every girl you bring you get paid £5. Bring more than 5 girls and you get a VIP table with a complementary bottle of vodka.
2. Go out daygaming on the afternoon of the night in question. Approach lots of girls with indirect social openers, preferrably tourists who are unlikely to know the nightlife but are keen to go out. “PR-close” them by offering them free entry and drinks to a good club. Hide sexual intent.
3. Mass text all girls later that night and arrange to meet them all in a nearby pub. Tell them to bring friends.
4. Socialise a bit in the pub and then lead a train of girls into the club and comped through to the VIP section. You are preselected to every girl in the club and to the girls in your group. Spend the evening drinking free vodka, joking around with girls, pulling random other girls from the dancefloor.
5. At the end of the night choose your favourite girl who is IOIing you for sex. If you’re really good, have threesomes foursomes and moresomes.
6. Rinse-repeat every week as your entourage grows bigger and the club begins to finance your lifestyle.

The Dream

Sounds awesome right? According to his own marketing literature Adam was regularly rolling into clubs with 50 hotties in his ho’train and banging millions of them. Let’s ignore for a moment the zero-to-hero bullshit of the AFC Adam story and all the pieces left out (i.e. he was already a well-connected PR party organiser as his job before he started game, that he’s a good looking guy, and that the only public domain evidence of Project Entourage is severely underwhelming). The marketing would have you believe all this success derives simply from playing a basic method of networking the value of a club to the value of a hot woman while you sit in the middle. There’s only one problem.

It’s a load of bullshit. Entourage game is for suckers. Allow me to explain.

1. Nightclub managers are usually double-dealing cunts who will happily throw you under a bus if a better deal comes along five minutes later. In order to get to a position where they cut you any slack at all you must be really good and bring them a stream of money. The clubs themselves are horrible soul-destroying places full of vacuous dappy tarts and higher-beta chodes trying to impress each other without having any fun. Drinks are £10 a pop so you are basically spending your evenings in someone elses gaudy loud sweaty basement.
2. PR-closes are basically bribery-closes. You are getting the girl along by playing the role of conduit between the nightclub and her, offering her monetary value. No-one respects PR men precisely because they are the low-value monkeys running around the streets trying to hustle girls into clubs. It is positioning yourself below the girl, not above, and setting yourself up as a provider to be used. The feeling of PR-closing girls is no different to being a telesales guy – it’s no fun at all.
3. You get more flakes than normal daygame. The girls who do come are self-selecting as party girls. They show no commitment because you are offering them a free lunch and asking nothing back. Zero investment.
4. The pub stage is like herding cats. Some of the girls will wander off on a whim because they know they can get into the club for free without you. If you’re lucky you’ll have a few decent conversations where you can build comfort and attraction but the big moment of disheartenment comes at….
5. Girls hang around your VIP table till the free drinks arrive and then the moment its finished the disappear onto the dancefloor. Thirty seconds of arm-waving and their value sky-rockets and the chodes descend on them. You’ll be lucky to see the girls again. Well done, you’ve just done a ton of work to feed these girls to the chodes.
6. Without a strong reason for your social circle to exist, it disintegrated and you rarely see the girls a second time.

The dizzy heights of success...

I won’t deny there are people who make entourage game work but they are a tiny minority and they spend their lives in nightclubs as they gradually become weirder and weirder people. Surrounding yourself with value-takers and dickheads, experiencing your women at their most superficial will harden you (that high-heeled tourist at your table might actually be a sweet well-rounded person if you dated her in a coffee shop, but in the club she’s a dappy tart overloaded with male attention and flashing lights). A couple of my wings learned entourage game from such a guy – a guy who actually made it work for him – and quickly became disillusioned. It surprised me when they first told me its a load of shit. They regalled me with stories of running around the streets late evening like blue-arsed flies, being treated with barely-concealed contempt from women, arguing with the door-whore to get free entry, then watching other guys steal the women, then wandering home at 4am wondering why you bothered. These are guys with good game who worked hard and learned from one of London’s top nightgamers.

Lets think for a moment why you wouldn’t even expect Entourage Game to work

Normal daygame works because of the value you show and the nature of the interaction. You are stopping girls in daylight while sober in a situation conducive to making good conversation and getting to know each other quickly, before instant dating to build deep rapport. The girl is impressed with your confidence and social savvy as you create something out of nothing while also keying into her social programming of how she’d like to meet a guy. You are the value. Contrast this with a PR close in which she doesn’t perceive confidence because there is no open intent, you frame yourself as a conduit of someone else’s value (the nightclub owners) and act like a low-status employee. Most PR closes are very short interactions of about five minutes and thus you don’t build the thought patterns and emotions in the girl that make her like you. If you did, you wouldn’t bother adding her to the entourage you’d just date her normally. She walks away from a PR-close thinking “fake social guy, to be used if I feel like clubbing”. She is not invested in you.

When you take such a flimsy connection to the club and dilute it with five or ten other girls (that’s a good night – fifty girls is magical thinking) you never get that sit-face-to-face-build-connection phase that is so crucial to pulling non-sluts. Your relations remain superficial and economic so she feels no social or emotional obligation to you. You are simply the guy who gets her through the front door and her first drink for free. You may as well be a hotel porter. So she walks into the club and gets her drink, probably enjoying the experience. But what have you done – you have brought a girl who don’t control into an environment full of competing males (many of whom will buy her drinks), a dancefloor she can spend the night on, music too loud to talk to her, and her sexual value will be the highest if has been all week. Of course you’re going to lose her to the myriad distractions of the club.

It's nowhere near as nice in reality

Compare that to taking the same girl on a one-on-one mid-afternoon coffee/park date that stretches into an evening drink. Before the sun sets you know each other well and she feels like she’s your friend and in your reality. On the unlikely occasion some chode hits on her in the bar, she’s already spent three hours connecting with you and social etiquette requires her to blow him out even if she fancies him.

It remains a golden rule of game that girls will sleep with you if your value exceeds their attraction threshold. Normal daygame provides a vehicle to meet women in optimum circumstances to display high personal charismatic value and monopolise her attention until you have a sufficient hold on her that other suitors are at a huge disadvantage in their attempts to steal her. Entourage game positions you as a dwarf on someone else’s mountain and minimises your circumstances to show personal value while maximising the opportunities for other guys to steal her.

There’s no shortcut to sex with high quality women. Sitting them in someone else’s shitty noisy basement doesn’t raise your chances. So if I think it’s a waste of time for a guy with my priorities who is it actually a good idea for? I would say if several of the following statements apply to you then give it a go:

• I enjoy going to nightclubs. I might as well get in for free and try something new
• I usually do well SNLing party girls and fancy trying a different way of getting them
• I want to try my hand at all different types of game
• I have a huge ego and the thought of calling ten girls “my entourage” appeals to me even if they don’t consider themselves my girls
• I want to have sex with lots of girls but don’t want to work hard building my own value, so I’ll be happy with the occasional drunken six

Disclaimer

I’m talking about the specific method of using Entourage Game. None of this applies to guys who build a good social circle around genuine value or who meet lots of hot women socially due to other reasons (e.g. a fashion photographer) and then roll into a club with all their genuine friends.

It’s time to get all sociological. Few principles in Game are as powerful or efficient as frame control yet it’s a nebulous concept that is difficult to operationalise. So let’s start from first principles. What is “frame”?

Frame is the implicit set of assumptions and expectations used to interpret a social situation.

Consider a man and a woman sitting at a dining table in a dark room, eating dinner as a candle burns between them. How do we interpret such a situation? If we have further knowledge we might infer it’s a romantic date at the man’s house while he seeks to close the girl. But perhaps it’s a brother and sister and there’s been a power failure knocking out the electric lights. There is a wealth of information “in the ether” around your direct perception of the social situation that affects the meaning the participants place upon it. The ability to impose your preferred assumptions and expectations onto the situation is your frame control.

A tangentially-related photo, yesterday

To understand frame control you need to understand perception. It is commonly assumed that the real world exists in an objective state and our senses perceive it. Readers with even a cursory knowledge of psychology (or an inquisitive mind) know perception is actually a constructive active process in which the brain takes limited incomplete information and fills in the gaps with pre-existing knowledge and expectations. Have you ever woken from a bad dream and thought that shadow over your bed was a homicidal intruder, only to rub your eyes and realise it’s your dressign gown hanging from a peg in a vaguely humanoid shape? The fact perception is active explains much of the disagreements men have when watching their favourite sports – you see the punches Manny Pacquiao lands and are blind to the onces from Juan Manuel Marquez and thus render a bad decision after 12 rounds. It’s when you probably haven’t been thinking of how the material of your shoes feels against your toes until I just brought your attention to it now.

Frame control involves directing the participants in a social situation towards those fragments of information you wish them to attend to and then filling in the gaps with your preferred interpretation. It is best done subtley. I’ll use language semantics as an example.

Most of the meaning required to interpret a sentence is not actually present in the words. The words are merely signals to meaning. This is not to say words are arbitrary – If I say “dog” there’s only a limited number of images that spring to mind, and probably none of them look like “caterpillar” or “milkshake”. When people have a shared biology, shared education, shared television channels, share cuisine etc we soon develop a shared understanding of the world that can be referred to.

Not milkshake

Direct / Indirect speech

Have you noticed that legal documents are extremely tedious whereas movie dialogue is often compelling? Lawyers cannot rely upon a shared understanding because it leaves too much wiggle room in court and this all terms must be precisely defined and all assumptions stated. This is incredibly boring, like your mind is shackled and not allowed to fill in the blanks to get to the point quickly. Conversely, movie dialogue “turns exposition into ammunition” and talks around a subject in short sentences, relying upon the actor’s faces, body language, gestures, and the surrounding plot and set design to give all the cues needed to follow the story without spelling it out to you.

Here’s a quick game tip: always use indirect language. It’s far more engaging. Imagine a TV show where John has been “missing” all weekend and comes back to the house he rents with Bill, sporting a wedding ring, sun-reddened face, and dishevelled clothes.

Direct:

Bill: Hey John. Where have you been this weekend? You were missing and we didn’t know what happened to you. You are awfully sun-burned.

John: I have been to Las Vegas with my girlfriend Valerie. We got married in a casino chapel then drove back in my open-topped Cadillac.

Indirect:

Bill: I never took you for a road-tripping adventuring romantic

John: A regular Vegas wedding!

In order to interpret the latter exchange you must be more sensitive to the surrounding details, choose the important ones more judiciously, and work harder as your brain fills in the gaps. This is far more interesting and carries an even better upside of frame control which I’ll now go into. Consider verbal communication as following this simple model:

Writer’s members resources + situation + written words = intended meaning

Reader’s members resources + situation + written words = received meaning

(members resources = the sum of all knowledge, experience and assumptions that the brain can use to fill in the gaps left unspoken in the utterance / text)

This explains why it’s often difficult to understand historical texts without understanding why they were written, some biographical details of the author, and the scholarly debates of the day. The texts were written for a different situation and different members resources to what you currently have. Consider jargon. Can you understand a technical physics paper without understanding physics? I can’t. Consider:

“I was able to bounce my target home but she got LMR when I went for the close”

To intepret that sentence your members resources must include the jargon of Game (bounce, target, LMR, close) and also the situation of me being on a date with a girl I intend to fuck. For me to write a sentence that you dear readers can understand I must second-guess your members resources (hereafter “MR”). To encourage you to interpret these words as I intend them to be interpreted I am setting up an “ideal reader” which has a certain set of MR(e.g. Game knowledge) and situation (a man wishing to get better with women). It is only by occupying that role of ideal reader that you can really understand me.

Now let’s bring it back to frame control. If you remain in your “non-ideal” reader position you encounter resistance to understanding my words, and presumably you are reading me because you wish to understand whatever it is I’m saying. So long as you stick stubbornly to your own individual MR and situation you encounter resistance to clear understanding. Your brain dislikes inefficiency as much as it dislikes legalese. So you temporarily place yourself within the ideal reader position (hearafter “IRP”) until you reach understanding. It’s empathy and it’s investment.

So now you see the frame control possibilities of the model.

When entering a social situation you must first entice people to want to understand you. Whence motivated thus, you can use indirect language fashioned so that it can only be understood by adopting your chosen IRP for them. Repeatedly placing them in the IRP builds investment and rapport while framing them as you please. Over time this becomes the default mode of communication between you and they are now in your frame permanently. It underpins much of the classic Game cocky funny routines:

Her: That’s a nice t-shirt (touches you)

You: Hey, hands off the merchandise. That’s $5 you owe me

To understand your comment she pust adopt an IRP that includes MR of: I am chasing him, he has high value, he can tell me off, I must pay money for the privilege of touching him, I fancy him. It’s done playfully, but as you keep chipping away at her frame it will eventually crumble.