Lexicon ·
day game
noun, also 'daygaming'
- Stated meaning
- Approaching strangers in the street, in shops and in cafés during the day, in place of bars at night.
- Operating meaning
- An approach moved out of the rooms built for meeting strangers and into the places where strangers are busy doing something else.
- Origin
- Pickup vocabulary, in use on the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast by November 2005 as the daytime counterpart of night game. Richard La Ruina's The Natural gave it a chapter in 2012.
In November 2005 a poster on alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) reported meeting a man from a New York workshop whose focus “seems to be on day game as opposed to night game,” and asked whether there was a real difference. Within months the term had believers. A field report from Riga in March 2006 described “working on my day game” in the old city and added: “To me, day game, is real game.” Another poster recommended an opener to try “during your day game. See what happens and report back.”
By 2012 The Natural (opens in a new window), a pickup manual, gave it a chapter of its own. In 2022 the Big Issue (opens in a new window) described the practice from the pavement: “Daygaming sees men stop women they find attractive in the street – or in other places that aren’t bars and nightclubs – with the aim to get their phone number.” It is taught “through one-to-one coaching, bootcamps and even six-week transformation courses,” and the article recorded its legal position in one sentence: “Despite upcoming changes to public sexual harassment legislation, daygaming is legal.”
Under load, the method trades a room with posted terms for one with none. A bar announces what it is for, and everyone in it has paid to be there. The street announces nothing, and the person stopped on it is between 2 errands. One party has set the afternoon aside for approaches and counts them. The other counts interruptions. Both tallies describe the same afternoon, and only one of them is filed as a report.