[Archivist]

Game changed a lot, indeed and we grew up a bit older I guess.

Normies never needed game. As stated before, the sexual market works just fine.  ... [Game] was nothing but self-improvement with a lot of gimmicks and a damaging perspective based on some childish James bond wannabe illusions. 

This forum serves as a historical document for the cult we all to varying degrees fell for.

The Zero dates bangs thread was pure gold. I used this trick and banged many times.

Roissy wrote that game does not create sexual value, but is a "force multiplier".  So yeah, many average guys are lazy and satisfied with a convenient, average girlfriend.  Some even get lucky and get an above-average girlfriend.  Buy some normal guys are unlucky, spending a lot of energy with a bad love life.  Some guys have below-average skills, especially guys in male-dominated fields such as science or military.  Dr. Scott Alexander (who was incel) wrote about the high percentage of virgins among male MIT grad students.

Some guys don't want to settle for average.  It is galling to succeed at a place like MIT, have money and a promising career, and then have an empty love-life.  But that is the situation for many men.  Some risk factors are:

Male hobbies (science fiction, fantasy, video games, magic),
Male school/career (technology, engineering, military),
Precocious and young-looking,
short,
racial minority.

These guys needed some help.  More importantly, they needed lots of dating experience to catch up.  If you know your sexual market value, and you have some mature skills, then you don't sweat a dry spell.  It sucks if your job takes you to a remote place without opportunities.  But you won't settle for ugly or abusive women.  You will just wait a few months for appropriate opportunities.  But nerds need to learn their value and improve their skills.  They need dozens of dates per year just to become average.

Again, some guys don't want to be average.  They might have a slightly higher sex drive, or taste for variety.  They don't want to be a typical fat, indebted American in a crappy cubicle job without a satisfying love life.  They might make six figures, which is a lot of money in Indianapolis or Albany.  But they respond "fuck you, I don't want to live in an average boring city."  "I want to live in a cooler, more expensive city, like NYC, L.A., San Diego, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orlean, or Austin."  They can still make above-average incomes in expensive cities.  Yet, they might still struggle to match their educational, professional, and athletic success with romantic success.  

I'm not sure whether the game changed.  Certainly the online environment changed.  Women always strung men along while waiting for an alpha.  Sometimes they had clandestine affairs with men who were hotter, older, or richer.  But the internet made it possible to do this more easily.  This same environment taught men to stop getting manipulated.  In some ways this is bad, because it encourages men to make low-investment spam approaches.  But why the hell should men buy flowers and dinner, anyway?  The internet brought a healthy dose of reality to picky women.  And it taught men the "red pill" that if women are interested, they might come straight to your house.

Some of the early manosphere focused on male depression and suicide.  Maybe we should have a thread about that. Rollo Tomassi wrote about his brother-in-law.  Terrence Popp helps military veterans.  Anthony Bourdain suicided after learning that his girlfriend Asia Argento was cheating.  British food blogger Wilkes McDermid suicided over loneliness.  So did Norah Vincent, a lesbian who wrote "Self-Made Man" about dating as an undercover man.  I almost forgot about PUA coach Tom Torero, who suffered from depression, and finally suicided last year after getting bad publicity for marketing clandestine instructional sex tapes.