Name: The Rules of the Game
ISBN: 9780719561313

The Rules of the Game

If you want to play the Game, you've got to know the Rules. In his international bestseller The Game, Neil Strauss delved into the secret world of pick-up artists--men who have created a science out of the art of seduction. Not only did he reveal the techniques that they had developed, but he became a master of The Game, and the world's No. 1 PUA, as Style. Now, in his first follow-up to The Game, comes an extraordinary package: A lavishly produced, two-volume pocket-size set that every pickup artist--accomplished or aspiring--will need to have. The first book, The Stylelife Challenge,is the manual Strauss thought he'd never write: the ultimate guide to landing the woman of your dreams. Bound in white leatherette, it offers an in-depth 30-day program, Strauss challenges readers to confront their insecurities and overcome them through a process of rigorous self-examination, briefings and field missions. In the second book, Strauss takes readers into the dark side of The Game. Bound in black leatherette, The Style Diariesoffers a series of tales of seduction and sexual (mis)adventure.

What Hacker News says

tikhonjJun 2026

Leaders can matter—a lot—even if they do not exercise granular, top-down control. They can provide the right context and motivation, articulate high-level aims, resolve issues and create the kinds of systems and cultures that do not need explicit direction.

A great illustration of this idea in context is Andrew Gordon's book on the Battle of Jutland, The Rules of the Game[1]. He mostly contrasts the leadership philosophies in the British Navy shortly before and during the Battle of Jutland. The British Navy became very top-down and procedure-oriented during peacetime, which did not generalize well to operating in battle.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354137.Rules_of_the_Game

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credit_guyOct 2022

Firepower - by Paul Lockhart. A history of military advances, of guns, big and small, mainly in the West, mainly after 1300. Very impressive overall, but for me the most eye-opening was the arms-race preceding WW1. Nothing in the Cold War arms race came close to that.

The Rules of the Game - by Andrew Gordon. This is a 50 year history of the battle of Jutland. Meaning, one of the most thorough accounts of the battle of Jutland, plus a very detailed history of the 50 years preceding it, and the military/cultural background that led to the events at Jutland unfolding the way they did. A little innocent spoiler: after reading this book, you'll come to appreciate (like me) that one of the most consequential events in the world history (at least of the last two centuries) was the collision of HMS Victoria with HMS Camperdown two decades before the start of WW1. What a tragedy. There's a good chance that if that collision did not happen, then WW1 would not have happened, because Great Britain would have still been un-challengeble on the seas.

Freedom's Forge - by Arthur Herman. How America mobilized itself on the economic front. Unleashing the US industrial production juggernaut seems like preordained in hindsight, but it was anything but that. This book is a page turner. Once you start it, you know that you'll finish it.

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keithpeterJun 2017

Jutland: there were issues around the culture of waiting for signals (flags!) from the flagship and also around the personality of the Commander in Chief and some of the other admirals as well as the issue you mention.

See The Rules of the Game by Andrew Gordon if you have an interest in naval history or how large organisations respond to change.

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smacktowardMay 2017

> I think I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I would need a much clearer account of what he thought went wrong at Jutland to appreciate or agree with it.

To get that account I highly recommend jumping straight to the book the article cites at the top, Andrew Gordon's The Rules of the Game; it's a brilliant work, packed with detail but accessibly written and clearly argued. This article recapitulates some of Gordon's arguments, but the book itself is such a pleasure to read that if you are at all interested in the subject you owe it to yourself to check it out.

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smacktowardNov 2016

If this subject interests you, I recommend checking out Andrew Gordon's wonderful book The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (https://www.amazon.com/Rules-Game-Jutland-British-Command/dp...), which (among other things) goes into great detail on how complicated the Royal Navy's system of flag signaling had become by the turn of the 20th century, the efforts of some brilliant officers to simplify it, and the disastrous wartime results that came because others clung too hard to the positions of influence mastering that system had won them in peacetime to see that it was completely unworkable in war. It's a fascinating portrait of how technical innovation and institutional inertia can collide, and what happens when inertia is allowed to win.

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