In the airing anime No Game No Life, the protagonistic brother and sister were sent to a world set in Medieval period, with their smartphones. After watching the first two episodes, I find it quite fun to think about the question: how should they manage their smartphones’ usage?

The first thing that comes to my mind is that smartphones are essentially magic in the Middle Ages. If you are caught using a smartphone by Medieval people, you’ll certainly get into trouble. Thus, it is very important that the existence of your smartphone should be kept secret. Also, the smartphone is irreplaceable. You don’t want to lose it.

Then, I think of a big problem: there is no electricity supply. Once the battery died, the phone would be a brick forever. So we need to conserve power as much as possible. I can come up with the following points:

• Switch to flight mode, since there is no signal after all
• Adjust screen brightness to minimum, and turn off automatic adjustment
• Turn off background app refresh
• Don’t play games or listen to music! Not even once!

Now, let’s think about what advantages can the smartphone bring us in the Middle Ages:

• Calculator, which solves practically unsolvable arithmetic problems in the Middle Ages, easily and correctly. Through that, you gained the trust from the king.
• Camera, which records information accurately. The princess, who was a cute girl, let you read a secret tome in her room, but only once and didn’t allow you to take notes. People would assume you could only acquire very limited knowledge from the tome, but you actually took pictures of several important pages. The princess believed you must be a genius! (Just how ridiculous this plot is!)
• Compass. You led your team out of a death maze and became a hero.
• Voice recorder. Your archenemy, a hypocrite, finally showed his true colors and threatened you when you two were alone. However, it was all recorded and you exposed him in front of the princess. (At this point, we assumed that you could trust the princess enough to tell her the secret of your smartphone…)

Aah, this is so addictive. Am I missing any even more interesting scenarios?

However, as I read the light novel on which the anime was based, it turned out that the siblings had solar chargers. This is so evil! Why haven’t I seen anyone using a solar charger around? Now I’m deprived of fun.