Chris Collins and a guest pick one book and one video game for a desert island. The guest chooses Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and The Sims. They also explain that plenty of games don't need fast reflexes or a controller, making them accessible to new players.
So let's say that you are stranded on a desert island and you can only take one book in one video game because on this desert island you have electricity.
What would they be, book wise? You know, I might actually take Stories of youf Life by Ted Chiang because they have. There's so many good stories in there that I could go back to them and they're so filled. Like, even though they're short, they're just filled with so much imagery and the world themselves feel built out that I could just let my imagination explore them. And as far as a game, probably the Sims, just so I could pretend I had a normal life, like I could make a family, pretend I was doing okay. Ignore that. Like I had to like, you know, climb a tree to get a coconut down. I only know cartoon things. I don't know how to survive on an island.
Anybody who's trying to get into the world of video games, what advice would you give them?
I would say there are a lot of games that don't require you to have fast reaction times. There are games that you can play with a mouse. You don't need to pick up a controller. What a lot of people struggle with when they want to play games and they haven't before is, you know, they see these controllers that have 16 buttons on them and looks like you're going.
To drive an F1 car, right?
Exactly. You're going to drive an F1 car and you're supposed to be moving in a 3D space. And people just don't have the, I would say, hand vocabulary for that unless they learn it over time. But there's games like Phoenix Ace Attorney is a super funny game that you play with your mouse and you solve mysteries and it's on every system, it's on phones and it's something that is literally, I would say, like a text, a visual novel, but very easy to get into. There's another one called Overboard, which is a game in which you play a woman who has thrown her husband overboard a ship. And you have to convince everyone on the ship that you did not do it. So it's basically a reverse murder mystery where you're trying to hide the murder, but again, all you're doing is choosing dialogue selections. You don't have to have a quick reaction, you don't have to, you know, know all these combinations of buttons. It's very accessible. And I'll say there is a company called Choice of Games and they make, they make interactive novels, but all prose, no images, no, no sound or music or anything. You're just reading a novel and making choices throughout it. But the company does them so well that some of those novels can, like, they turn out heartbreaking. So if you're a big reader and you want to try a game, but you want something kind of simple that might be a combination of the two, choice of games has so many good options.
