Note: This piece overlaps with my three essays in the Week with Elodie series, though it approaches that week from a somewhat different direction. Where those pieces follow the arc, this one lingers on the moment before it resolves—the pre-game, as I’ve come to understand it.

It is also a direct response to Neil Strauss’ book The Game. I don’t intend to rebut Strauss so much as to correct what I see as a fundamental weakness in the subculture he dissects. The reader will judge whether or not I succeed.

Epigraphs:

Someone had to play that tune. I guess it was up to me.

— Bob Dylan, “Up to Me”

It all made some sense if you know what to play

– J Mascis, Elastic Days

I. Ippei

At around eleven one night, I was at Zaza, the nightclub on Kiyamachi in Kyoto, when a Japanese man of about fifty-five approached me. Let’s call him Ippei.

He had a proposition. Would I help him pick up two women? All I had to do was pretend to be an old friend from California, someone he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

He did this every night, he told me. The night before, he’d had a threesome.

We went over to the women. Ippei launched into a conversation in Japanese, working his story. I went upstairs to smoke. Twenty minutes later, I came back down. Ippei was still going strong, telling the same story to the same women.

I watched him for a moment.

He didn’t need me. He just needed me to play a role.

His story had landed. Reality was accepted. It was all on.

II. Neil Strauss’ The Game

I’ve read Neil Strauss’ The Game twice. I respect Strauss as an investigator of subcultures, and I think the book is serious reportage. He went inside a world, learned its language, followed its characters, and documented what he found.

My problem isn’t with Strauss as a reporter. It’s with the worldview at the center of the subculture he describes.

The premise is that attraction can be engineered. Learn the right language, the right sequence, the right signals. Find the moves that will break down a woman’s resistance and get you into bed.

It’s a kind of linguistic technology, NLP at its worst.

The system scripts what should be alive. It turns a conversation into a sequence of maneuvers, an encounter into a problem to be solved. Everything becomes instrumental. The point of the interaction is no longer the interaction itself. It’s the outcome.

There’s no room for romance in that equation. No room for the unexpected moment that changes the direction of an evening, or a life. The system is designed to get you somewhere, but it can’t tell you whether that somewhere is worth going.

Look at the group house, with Mystery, Strauss, and Courtney Love, for whatever Courtney Love-related reasons. It’s a sausage fest. And it is simply not cool.

The Gamers may have mastered the game. But somewhere along the way, they’ve stepped outside life itself. They’ve become incel-adjacent: men who have devoted themselves to understanding women while losing sight of the possibility of actually connecting with one.

I’m not interested in rebutting Strauss point by point. Instead, it’s a response.

And for me, that’s where I part ways.

III. The Game Itself

I’ve gone all the way with about a dozen women. The precise number is under strict NDA. I’ve made out with more.

Until this past summer, I wasn’t sexually active by the standards of the pickup community. But I’ve flirted with, connected with, and crushed on dozens of women.

And the truth is, I enjoy crushing on women.

I enjoy the tension, the ambiguity, the possibility. The spark that might become something, or might not. The moment when you can feel something happening but don’t yet know what it is.

For most men, the pre-game is a means to an end. It’s the part you get through on the way to the thing you really want.

For me, it’s the end itself.

However, I’m a highly specific kind of action junkie.

Wittgenstein was said to have manufactured his own oxygen. I manufacture my own action.

I don’t chase it blindly. I don’t optimize for it. I don’t try to force it into existence through systems or scripts.

I generate it. Selectively. Intentionally. And in moments where it actually might mean something.

IV. Luna

I was at Umineko in downtown Kyoto with Mr. Editor. It was around six in the evening when I saw her.

She was stunning.

I have to go talk to her.

So I did.

We spoke in Japanese. The conversation flowed. There was a spark. At some point, I asked for her Instagram. She gave it to me.

I was on Cloud Nine.

The next afternoon, I sent her a message. She didn’t respond.

Was that a failure?

Not for a pre-gamer.

I got the moment. I got the spark. I approached a woman I wanted to meet, and we had a brief, electric encounter. For a little while, there was the possibility of something.

That was the action.

That was the point.

For the Strauss guys, the night ends when the text goes unanswered. The interaction has failed to produce the desired outcome. The system hasn’t delivered.

For me, the night ended at the bar.

With Ippei, the action was more or less scripted. With Strauss, it was systematized. With Luna, it was self-contained.

This is where the epigraph from Dylan starts to carry real weight.

The pre-game isn’t simply a technique for getting what you want. It’s the moment before the outcome, when the possibilities are still open. It’s the point at which you have to decide what to do without knowing what will happen.

You can follow a script. You can learn the system. You can spend years studying the game.

Or you can pay attention.

A script can tell you what to say. A system can tell you what to do next. Neither can tell you what a particular moment means, or what it might become.

And that’s the difference.

The pre-game is not about controlling the outcome. It’s about recognizing the possibility in front of you and deciding whether to act.

No script. No system. No Ippei handing you a premise.

There is only the moment as it actually exists, and your ability to see it clearly.

And then the second part.

It was up to me.

Not to escalate. Not to optimize. But to decide.

The game ends when something happens. The pre-game ends when you decide it should. That is all.

Dedication:

For pre-gamers everywhere. May you get a little action tonight, baby.