So you see some girls in the bar. You walk up to flirt with them.  They ask some question… “Oh my god! You guys are like inquisitive little investigators! You are like ninja investigators that strike out to find the answers you want! I am totally gonna hire you as my ninja assassin strike team and you will be sent into old ladies houses for me to steal their fresh-baked cookies! You are gonna be blue ninja, and you are gonna be pink ninja… but YOU… YOU get to be the argyle ninja because you are the deadliest. Yeah, your outfit is going to be one giant argyle sock with a little slit cut in it for your eyes.”

Wait, where are they going?

“Guys?..”

“guys?..”

“I didn’t… overgame you… did I?”

Overgaming is when you do (or overdo) something and it is kind of weird.

Take the above example. That was a WHOLE lot of playful banter. Say, for the sake of argument, that I unloaded that clip of banter, machine gun style, into a group of women. I would hope they would start laughing and giggling and pawing at me, but if I kept it up they might start to think “well, this is fun and silly, and it makes me laugh, but this guy is kind of weird because all he does is stand there and say all these goofy things to us without stopping”.

What is really going on here is that I am bantering AT them, rather than bantering WITH them, and that is why they give me the “overgamed” response in this hypothetical little situation. You can banter AT a girl for a second, but you better get into a conversation WITH her right after that. A conversation with a girl goes by many names, but we usually refer to it as “vibing” or “rapport”. It can also be banter, but it better be banter with a girl, rather than at her.

I have had banter conversations that go on for a good half hour. The reason that these conversations didn’t end up as overgaming was that we were bantering together. We ended up playing a game that everyone was joining in on. Remember, when banter is really working, it is a two way street. If you are out at a party or something like that it is OK to banter with people a lot. You DON’T want to just hose them down with banter though, because then they will be all soggy. You want to kind of bat the birdie back and forth with banter.

NOTE: This post is a modified version to a response to a question on the PickUp Lounge, the PickUp 101 VIP discussion board.