There is a question that always comes up when I introduce the NoGame app to someone: “So, what does it mean? What does it stand for, ‘NoGame’?”

I rarely give people the full answer to that question. In fact, there is no straight-forward answer. There is only a long story and I am not even sure if that story has ended or if it is still unfolding. Now, for the first time, I feel that this story can be told. Here on this page, it has the space it deserves. The space it needs to still breathe and potentially grow. It is time to disclose the truth about how NoGame got its name. Along the way, this story reveals everything that truly matters about the project. If you are still on board, take a deep breath and dive in.

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Choosing good names is important but it has always been difficult for me. A name needs to capture and clearly communicate the essence of a project. When it is time to decide on a name, however, I am usually still uncomfortably uncertain about what that essence is! A name also guides the project going forward: The name of an organization becomes a mantra that shapes its philosophy and culture. So when I had to give a name to the company and app I was building, I felt anxious. I knew I had to think deeply about what it was that I was creating. And I knew I had to be certain about this decision and all its implications in order to stand fully behind it.

The undercurrent

When I make a big irreversible decision I want to have the universe on my side. I wait for signals to guide me. It was the same when I decided to get a tattoo. I had gotten the idea one day at an office job. I was bored with work and scribbled two parallel, thick lines on the inside of my forearm. It didn’t have any meaning then, but I immediately liked the look of it. Then over the next 3 years the symbol kept reappearing in various thoughts and experiences. I kept finding new meanings in it and even started a small booklet to collect them all. I started playing around with different variations and positioning and got temporary henna tattoos to test it out. Three years later and with 12 different meanings, I was certain enough to get it inked. I loved the fact that there was not just one meaning of the tattoo, but rather a continuous stream of meanings that didn’t – and still doesn’t – stop. This is what made me confident that I would never regret this decision. Something similar happened with the naming of NoGame.

The source

It all started when I met Sascha, a guy in his late 20s. We were both in a WhatsApp group for people with a shared interest in personal development and social skills. But even among those people Sascha stood out as particularly outgoing and social. Every few days he would post in that group with hundreds of members: “Hey, I’m going out tonight around central Berlin. Hit me up if you want to join!” He seemed to be meeting a dozen new people every week. I was curious to get to know this guy.

We became friends and a few months later he showed me a system he had devised in order to stay organized with all those new connections he was making. For starters, he didn’t just use the built-in contacts app of his phone. He used Google Contacts, so he could add detailed notes to all his contacts and organize them into groups. He also added acronyms and codes behind the name for each contact: For people he knew well he would put a number behind the name that signified the level of trust he had with that person. Behind a contact he had just met he would put the acronym AC. It stood for ‘Assessment Center’. These were people he would assess over the next few weeks and decide whether to keep in his network or not. And behind people that he had already decided not to re-engage he put NEXT in all capital letters.

I was intrigued by the rigor and efficiency Sascha brought to his social life. And of course I was wondering what code was behind my name in his phone! Then he showed me another code. And that one changed the course of my life:

Sascha was single but he preferred to get to know women in the real world rather than online. He was confident enough to approach girls in clubs, bars and even in the streets. He had a lot of friends who did the same and I got to know some of them. Many of them were highly motivated achievers who cared about personal development and despised the drugs culture of our city in favor of a more sober approach to life. But there were also a few severely troubled individuals. Some lacked basic social skills, some had obviously suffered serious trauma and some were just weird. When you went with them to a bar or party, they could crash into the conversations you are having, awkwardly hit on the girl you are talking to and drive the whole crowd away that you had worked so hard to attract. Whenever Sascha met a guy like that, he put another code behind the name in his phone: NOGAME.

I immediately liked the ring of this expression and started considering it as a name for my app. It really didn’t make any logical sense, but I loved the irony. Over the next months that seed grew into a tree full of associations and meaning. I kept finding new ways to interpret the combination of these two simple words. New streams of meaning kept emerging from experiences, insights and conversations. At first they seemed disconnected but eventually they all flowed together into one.

Stream I

Another word for offline dating is ‘game’ and men who engage in offline dating often identify as part of the ‘game’ community. My app was supposed to be for people from that community. But the term ‘game’ had gotten a bad name. It had been coined by Neil Strauss who wrote a book titled The Game. In it he reveals a lot of the manipulative and objectifying techniques used by pickup artists to seduce women. I was uncomfortable with those ideas and techniques.¹

I also didn’t think that the term ‘game’ really worked as a metaphor to describe human behavior in the dating context. Dating is not a game, it is a real part of life, just like your career, sports or spirituality. 

Many people don’t actively work on this part of their lives. Finding and attracting romantic partners is the most natural thing for them. They don’t have to spend a lot of time researching the social mechanics behind it. The users of the app I was creating, however, are different (in some way or another and for different reasons, link to other essay on this). Dating and expressing their sexuality does not come naturally to them. They need to follow a process to actively learn and practice certain skills that are required for success in this area. 

This process has elements of playing a game. There are players, rules you are supposed to follow, payoffs and punishments waiting at the finish line. Economic game theory can be a useful paradigm to understand much of the dynamics at play. But all social phenomena – dating, politics, wars – can be analyzed through the lens of game theory. In that narrow sense everything can be seen as a game! Clearly the fact that game theory can be used to analyze wars does not mean that wars are games. Dating is only a game inasmuch as war is a game and everything is a game.

Learning to express oneself sexually and finding a romantic partner is a highly profound and sensitive process. It involves a range of ethical and emotional landmines. On a primordial evolutionary level, it can even feel like a struggle for existence and survival! It is a natural, important and serious part of life. It is not a game. No Game.

Stream II

If you are having trouble finding love and want to get this part of your life sorted without using online dating apps, you have to go out and meet a lot of people.

Humans are incredibly diverse. You can form loose friendships with many, but you will only ever be able to form deep emotional relationships with the very few people out there who are compatible with your unique personality. This is especially true for people who are a bit more weird than the average (or feel themselves to be). For these people the number of potential partners is rather small. There are very few people who are weird in a compatible way. You can temporarily change who you are to be liked by more people but that usually backfires. You can also just keep looking within your friend circle and acquaintances but you are very unlikely to find a compatible match there, because that is just such a tiny fraction of humanity. As a man in that situation, if you want to stay true to yourself and find someone you actually like, you really only have one path of action available: Express your true self to a lot of women and wait until you find someone who likes that true self. 

You have to know your true self and you have to know how to express it and then you keep doing that until it clicks. Ultimately it’s a numbers game. NºGame.²

Stream III

I was already convinced of the name and had started using it, when I found yet another meaning. I was talking to a friend about his lackluster love life while working out at the gym. Surrounded by the heavy metal it can feel more permissible for a man to go deep and show his soft side. This guy had been through a lot. He had paid different ‘dating experts’ for individual coachings, taken courses in neuro-linguistic programming, and practiced emotional releasing. Nonetheless he still found it hard to relate to the female gender.

Between sets of deadlifts, his face lit up and he turned to me to share a new insight. He had recently spent some hours with a dating coach, who proclaimed to have seduced hundreds of women and was looked up to as a Guru by many in the community. And there was one thing this dating coach had said that really stuck with him: “You know, he told me this: Even on his best days, when he is on his very best game, he still only ends up getting with 40% of the women he hits on! He said: Look, 60% of the girls you talk to will never be interested in you, no matter what you do or say. So there is no reason to beat yourself up about getting rejected most of the time! They have a boyfriend, they don’t want to date right now, they think you’re ugly, or they’re just weird. You can’t do anything about it, it’s always going to be a no from them!”

The core of this statement immediately hit me as true. When you go out in the real world and express your romantic interest to a stranger, it’s rather unlikely that the interest is reciprocated. This is what makes the whole process so hard. You make yourself vulnerable and usually you get shot down. Even if you show your best self. And no matter how often you have done it before, it hurts every time. The question is just: How do you deal with those nos? Your answer to that question is what makes or breaks you in offline dating.

The continuous shower of rejections is frustrating because it can make you feel undeserving and hated by most women out there. So men generally avoid it altogether and turn to online dating instead, where rejections are more concealed.

But there is power in facing rejection and accepting it as an inevitable reality:

First, by confronting the discomfort of a rejection you strengthen your emotional stability. You become less dependent on what other people think of you and more centered in yourself. It’s like a cold shower or a tough workout: It’s uncomfortable but it really doesn’t harm you and makes you stronger. Every rejection still hurts, but it hurts less every time.

Second, rejections can serve as a useful guide on your personal development journey. Women have great intuition and when they dislike you it is often because of something that you, too, dislike or are unsure about in yourself. Experiencing rejections, instead of hiding from them, helps you figure out what that is. You can be grateful for a rejection like that, because it shows you that you still have work to do on your own.

Third, once you have done your homework of being the person you want to be and learning to express that, rejections help you uphold and define that true self. When you have expressed yourself fully and truly, a clear no simply means that the girl doesn’t like you as you are. There is nothing pain- or shameful about that. In fact, it is a great thing: A rejection like that is a reminder of what kind of person you are and what kind of person you are not. By definition, having a distinct and bold personality means that it won’t be liked by everyone. In order to find the small group of people who would love you, you need to display those edgy parts and be willing to be disliked by a lot of other people. The earlier you find out whether someone likes those edges or not, the better. In this case, getting a strong no is better than getting a lukewarm yes, because a strong no proves that you have expressed yourself fully and authentically. It is a signal that you are on the right path.

If you don’t want to avoid rejections, you better get good at dealing with them because you will get tons. Offline dating is not a Yes-Game. It’s a No-Game.

The River

When you have an idea for a name or a tattoo or anything really and it has just one definite meaning, you can easily find trouble with it and doubt it. But when new meanings keep accumulating that are all connected and you can’t even say which of them is the most intriguing, that is a clear signal that you have tapped a powerful and persistent flow in the universe.³ A flow like that is resilient to change and doubt. It can adapt and transform and escape obstacles through its own multifacetedness and internal contradictions. It’s alive. More tributaries of meaning can arise. Individual streams can be rerouted or blocked off. But that water will always find a way.

No Game, NºGame, No-Game – all three meanings arose from separate lines of thought. But as the avid reader has noticed, these streams are not completely independent of each other. At times they overlap, at times they connect and at times they run in opposite directions contradicting each other. Eventually they all flow together: You need to understand all three meanings to grasp the essence of the NoGame project. And you need to understand all three meanings to succeed at offline dating. Treat humans with dignity and respect. Express yourself fully and meet a lot of people. Accept rejection gracefully.

Footnotes

1. Nevertheless, I loved the book and think that together with its sequel “The Truth” it is one of the greatest love stories of the century. However, if you are looking for practical advice, rather than a thrill of literary excitement, Mark Manson Models is probably the better choice.
2. This is the numero sign. Its use is antiquated, but I had seen it a lot during my years in India. Probably that is the only place in the world where it is still commonly used – like so many Victorian traditions that endured in exile while long abolished at home.
3. Probably I am mystifying a very natural and scientifically explainable process. Once you have conceived an idea, your brain filters all the information that flows in and cherry-picks the impressions that fit into your pattern.