Why can’t life be all fun and games?

As a kid, I played board games with my little sister – a lot. My family had one television… As a kid, I played board games with my little sister – a lot. My family had one television that only got seven channels. None of which were Nickelodeon, so games were must-haves, whether they were of the board, card or imaginary persuasion.

Now, as a quasi-adult, my television gets no channels at all, and the games that I play are not as fun as the ones from my childhood. They have no dice – even though every move is a gamble, no endless supply of fake money and, worst of all, no set rules. The more that I think about it, the “games” of adulthood aren’t really games at all. They tend to be more like problems – problems that can’t be solved by simply stating: “Peacock with the knife in the conservatory.”

Then again, I’m beginning to think that games could be useful tools for overcoming life’s little hardships. For instance, as a writing major, or really just a college student in general, I’m often faced with the task of penning papers.

These five-to-seven- – or sometimes 10-to-12– page torture devices have an odd way of reducing me, a semi-confident writer, to a bumbling mess unable to think up coherent sentences or clever synonyms. The sight alone of a blank Microsoft Word document seems to trigger writer’s block in me.

Sometimes, rather than staring down my laptop for endless unproductive hours, I turn to Scrabble to jumpstart my word-forming abilities. The trouble there is that my roommate, a kitten named Ingrid, is not the best wordsmith, resulting in a severely one-sided Scrabble competition.

This is where Literati, the Yahoo games’ online version of Scrabble, takes over. Normally, a quick 30-minute game is enough to unblock my brain and bring a smile to my face.

Of course, not all of life’s difficulties are caused by school. As my sister reminds me on an almost daily basis, dating can be troublesome as well – and one of the biggest issues is chemistry. You either have it or you don’t, right?

Well, yes, but the trouble lies in figuring out if it’s there. A few years back, I found myself drawn to a guy who I’d been friends with for a long time, so I set out to make this friendship a relationship. Long story short, I made a mess of it. Kissing him was like kissing a sibling – yuck – but I didn’t know that unfortunate fact until we had already jeopardized our friendship.

Now, I wish that I had devised the Twister test back then. It would have saved me from several awkward confrontations. “Twister test?” you ask. Simply put, play the game. Close proximity, entwined limbs