18/30: Daygame, Big Five Personality Traits, and Gamma Males

Xants made an excellent point that Daygame is a dying art. I’ve had to take his word on that having been in the Game less than two years, although I must say there seems to be far fewer of them than at this time last year.

This year I’ve been giving a lot more Daygamers passing nods as I’ve spent enough time out there to recognise them. But when it comes to beginners, I see very few. You can tell because of their innocent faces, but also because lurking somewhere nearby will be their wing. That’s another thing I see nearly nothing of: solo Daygamers. I’m not saying that from a moral high ground; it’s an observation that serves to make a point: Daygame is hard to get started on your own. It’s even harder to stick at it on your own, even years in. Unless, that is, you are me i.e. a GAM. (I’ve just Googled that to see whether people will be finding out what I meant. Unfortunately, I’m not a gay asian male, nor a global array manager. I have to settle for being a god amongst men).

I set out to write this post and talk about the decline in the number of Daygamers, but I think that City Daygame post shows it well enough. I also considered writing about how the changing popularity of Daygame would affect its effectiveness, but then I thought about how women don’t even perceive low quality male attention and so in a city with a rotating door like London, it doesn’t matter much. I also didn’t want to discuss whether I liked the fact that it is declining in popularity, because I don’t have many years to compare to.

So I settled on writing about the big five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extroversion. I started to think why so many people drop out of Daygame, and why they don’t stick it out, from a personality POV. I think that to get good at this you will have a personality that matches what I’m about to describe (using the big five as parameters), or at least you will build towards it.

First of all, I think you need to be high in openness to experience, otherwise you would just continue plugging away at your old social circle or work hustles. So you need to be either naturally open or at a place in your life when your openness soars. There’s nothing like a crushed ego to make you get creative and thinking about wacky solutions.

Next you would need high conscientiousness to actually start Daygaming. I guess this is why so many guys get stuck at the beginner stage. They want to Daygame but they don’t have the gumption to get the snowball rolling themselves. They’re reliant on their wing, not just to reduce their AA in field, but to just encourage them to show up in the first place. I remember one of the first guys I winged with had been Daygaming on and off for two years, but still only did three sets that day (he was nowhere near a zen stage either).

Having that conscientiousness, whether internal or external (outsource to a wing), allows the budding Daygamer to lower their agreeableness and their neuroticism. This is the key to their masculinisation/de-pussifcation, and their journey towards reaching their potential SMV.

Lastly there’s extraversion, but I don’t think Daygame makes you an extrovert. It makes you very good at one type of interaction but ironically you get the same AA when put in, say, a club environment. The old questions such as what do I say, come back. Daygame probably makes you more of an ambivert because you learn how to interact with people in a charismatic manner but it doesn’t make you learn to draw energy from crowds. This is assuming that you’re starting as an introvert, of course, but then again, I think extroverts have less need for Daygame. They’ve always fit in so are less likely to experience the ego crush required to begin Daygame unless perhaps they’ve been doing Nightgame for a long time and want to transfer over.

By the end of the journey, the successful Daygamer would probably have: high openness, high conscientiousness, low agreeableness, and low neuroticism. That sounds like a very attractive individual, but highlights how the process is a journey. If someone started with that combination of traits then they would be a natural and probably wouldn’t need Daygame.

To conclude, and as promised in the title: gammas. Everyone has gamma traits, some more than others, but we know that Daygame attracts them in greater numbers because it’s sold as a secret system. Even if it wasn’t sold to you that way, it would be easy to arrive at that conclusion when you idolise the success of the name PUAs.

The traits where Gammas fall down to begin with are that they have high neuroticism and low conscientiousness. Their prickly frames lead to low agreeableness and their high intellect leads to higher openness (intellect being a facet of openness).

But I think the key lies in conscientiousness. I think that it’s tough to stay as a gamma male with high conscientiousness. Firstly, to score high on that you’ll have to be loyal and dependable. Secondly, your industrious side will make you confront reality. So I think that most of them will have low conscientiousness which makes it more important than their high neuroticism. They don’t get a chance to lower their neuroticism because they don’t have the oomph to go out there and start reducing it. They can outsource the AA to a wing but the wing will think he’s a twat and stop winging with him.

The gamma is left in a pit which is just too high for him to climb out of. He scuttles up one side but slips back down. He tries to go out alone but does no sets. He meets a wing online but they never see eye to eye. I’m not trying to build sympathy for him, he is a twat after all, but maybe once he’s gone through the journey he’ll be less of one.

Perhaps this is why the number of Daygamers leaving the community exceeds those entering. Daygame attracts a higher proportion of gammas who don’t have the conscientiousness needed to sort out their Inner Game and succeed in the long run. Perhaps the answer is for beginners to focus on building “industrious momentum”: be more organised, keep things in order, make promises and keep them. Then the mindset changes to “when I set myself a goal I achieve it”, and from there you can escape the beginner stage.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown