2/7/2017

​A while back in the late Seventies and early  Eighties when Peter Gabriel was coming up with great albums all just under his name (first three to be exact), he also came up with a great song titled “Games Without Frontiers”.

    Formally titled based on a very popular TV show in Europe with an international character, that had teams from different countries compete in usually very ludicrous games, Gabriel, of course, had in mind very different games that crossed borders.

    Many people still consider any kind of games as ludicrous, particularly in this digital age, when such a plethora of them is available on every single computer that comes out of the store. As far as freelance writers are concerned, they are usually mentioned in the context of procrastination and steering writers away from their work. But is it always the case, and should games, any kind of games, be simply discarded s useless?

    Actually not. They should actually be used as a useful tool when you are /really/ procrastinating, or when you are really stuck at that moment. 

    Getting stuck usually leads to procrastination, or you get tense and upset that things are not going the way they should, or those sentences that should be fitting like a glove to the other text are simply not there at the moment.

    Letting your work rest for a while and relaxing with a game might actually be the right trigger to get you back on track. Concentrating on something like a puzzle releases the energy and pushes in the right direction - it clears the way for those ideas to come back your way and actually give you that additionally needed spark, even new ideas.

    Or maybe you want to get away from that flickering screen and can’t go out to fresh air for some reason or other. It is better than to get out an old fashioned deck of cards and play some solitaire or other. Or get yourself a set of Tarot cards, not necessarily to use them for divination, but to simply spread them out - all sort of inspirational thoughts might come out of it and not necessarily tied to any mysticism or spiritualism, and even that can be a clue to some future story or a novel.

    In essence, by turning games into a tool instead of time wasters, some frontiers that have cropped up in your mind might drop down, and Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers might get an additional meaning.

---