It’s been a busy pair of weeks.

The week before last was Origins, an exhausting one. On top of manning a booth before, during, and after exhibitor hours, I was finishing up work on an editing-and-layout project, spinning up momentum on a writing-and-design project, and planning new work with old partners and new ones. I was literally, and perhaps unjustly (but at my own invitation), kicked in the shin with regard to one such project. All of this, of course, had to be done between and among things like eating, drinking, sleeping, and watching Hal murder a perfectly nice appetizer.

(I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on GPW yet, but I left Fantasy Flight about two months ago to go solo, writing and designing games. I’m working freelance for a variety of companies you’d recognize, as well as pursuing other projects of my own. FFG and I parted amicably, and continue to work together.)

Last week, I went away for a family vacation in northern Minnesota, which is beautiful country that you should visit if you have an opportunity. Will tried to get me to write about Origins before I left by noting that I had written this, Thing 52, in Things We Think About Games, and then said nothing more about it:

Go to game conventions.

It’s still good advice, but I’m glad I didn’t write about Origins, and Thing 52, until now.

For the past few years, I’ve returned from family vacations with an expanded and clarified sense of perspective on my whole life, personal, family, and professional. A trip around Christmas last year was especially valuable. I’m coming to look forward to time away from my regular routine not because it’s a break from work but because the act of setting aside the usual routine is a really good way—maybe the only good way—to get a sense of perspective about the usual routine.

From a removed perspective, I’m able to see which critical projects have been shunted to the side by loud and clanging but—it turns out—relatively unimportant competitor projects. I’m able to get a sense of whether the things I’ve been spending my days doing are actually moving my life in the direction I want to go. I’m able to see which of my personal and professional relationships are productive and positive, and which need something new, be it more attention, a different approach, or a speedy application of that most useful James Bond gadget, the ejector seat.

So, too, should it be with your gaming and your gaming conventions. That’s the lesson of Thing 52.

Unless you travel from convention to convention to make some kind of horrible and twisted living, or unless you have the kind of horrible and twisted life where you only play games at game conventions, a game convention encourages you to set aside the usual routine of your gaming life. It helps you see, from a fresh vantage, whether the games you play, and the people you play them with, and the circumstances of your game buying, and your game playing, and perhaps even your game writing and game designing, are serving you well.

A game convention serves as a far better survey point on the landscape of your life as a gamer than a traditional vacation because it brings the fact of gaming to the fore. A worthwhile game convention provides a wide variety of challenges to your day-to-day game playing, buying, writing, and designing assumptions. It gives you a chance to try playing new games for yourself, sure, but it also makes you see games played differently, see games played by people with different styles, see games bought and sold in different ways, and hear about games from strange and foreign lips.

So.

Go to game conventions.

Rejuvenate your game-life the same way a proper vacation breathes new vitality into the rest of your life.