Die Hard said:
I'm curious, what are you getting at? In asking that question "at what cost?", you seem to be implying that there's a big downside to developing game.
It's the necessity of "game" that is the cost.
Since the dawn of man, mating played out according to nature, and only the dweebiest of dweebs coulnd't find a mate. Women were happy to find a man and love him andserve him for life. She would consider herself fortunate.
Cut to 2011, and we have clueless, desperate guys by the thousands subscribing to sites like this this because they literally have no idea how to attract a woman. I'm not putting these men down; most of us were clueless before finding this and other similar sites.
We need to learn routines to use as training wheels until we acheive congruence. We need to learn how to counter feminism and all the rudeness and entitled thinking that goes along with that. We are, after all, in an age where even fat, ugly war pigs think they deserve a hot guy.
Essentially we are forced to learn how to manipulate our encounters and employ methodologies in order to even have a fighting chance.
So I would say that "Game", as we know it today, is a
symptom of an incredibly sick and twisted society. I think that future generations will look back on ours with a certain disbelief that society could have gotten so unnatural and twisted, because I believe that in the future nature will restore a degree of sanity to male/female relationships.
Having been born in 1957 and lived through many societal changes (I was in high school in the 70s), I have seen the entirety of feminism's birth and propagation. I have witnessed men's declination from leaders and captains of business and industry down to snivelling chumps who are desperately afraid to offend women. I'm starting to sound like that robot in Blade Runner. "I have seen..."
To bottom-line it, we have been forced into an incredibly contrived social climate, and we men are therefore forced to contrive counter-measures. That is the cost. Most of us want to be decent, friendly, giving and kind men. But we find that these admirable traits are repulsive to women. When we step outside the arena that we find ourselves in and look at the world in ther perspective of human nature and history, we can really see how strange it is that men are tapping away at their keyboards trying to figure out how to get girls to like them.