3QQ interview: Sandeep Parikh on Games

One of the internet's favorite actors and RPG-ers answers three questions from Quora.

Jul 24, 2024

Welcome to Three Quora Questions, our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).

Actor and writer Sandeep Parikh’s career has revolved around games for more than a decade. He co-starred in gamer-centric webseries The Guild; created beloved Zelda parody The Legend of Neil; and wrote alongside yours truly for the superhero-style gamers in Glitch Techs. Most recently, he co-created DesiQuest, an epic Dungeons & Dragons-style actual-play show with an all-South Asian cast.

Since Sandeep can’t escape games no matter how hard he tries, I figured it was the perfect Quora subject to pester him with.

Is life a game?

SANDEEP: Yes, life is a game. You are required to gain skills, apply them to your skill tree, build relationships, defeat mini-bosses, solve puzzles, and eventually, when you win the game, you just reboot and start over from zero.

Good luck, fuckers.

Is playing "role playing games" dangerous?

SANDEEP: I mean, not playing role-playing games is dangerous. That's what I think.

I think playing role-playing games is super healthy and should be considered a part of your, like, hygiene as a human being. So you can practice inhabiting other characters, stretching yourself, challenging yourself to empathize with the characters you create, and gain more empathy. Thus gaining more points for life. Which is a game.

You’ve just died. You only have one chance at resurrection if you can beat God at a game of your choice. What game would you choose?

SANDEEP: I think I'm really, really good at thumb wrestling. I also recently, and this is not a joke, learned from a thumb wrestling champion the two keys to pretty much at least always stalemating a match.

One is you gotta always attack the knuckle. A lot of people try to go straight over the top or the middle of the thumb. It’s most intuitive. But you actually want to hit the back knuckle, because it's really difficult to get out of a pin.

The second is that if you are pinned, you also have to apply some opposite logic. Instead of trying to pull up, which a lot of people tend to do because you're being pressed down on, you actually press your thumb down, which gives you the space to then slip out the back. You go with the pin.

So I feel pretty confident that I could sort of outlast God, at least in the sense that, you know, God probably has better things to do than continue thumb-wrestling me.