As a father to an infant, I don’t really have much time for video games these days. Especially not the type of games I love - sprawling RPGs, strategy games, or city builders. So most of my limited gaming time has been spread between watching YouTube videos from my favorite gaming creators, writing about games (like now), and actual gaming time distributed across a few handheld devices.

Over the past few decades, I formed a clear relationship in my head between myself and games. I’m a specific type of a gamer - I play games that require quite a bit of an investment, which results in a grand pay-off. The aforementioned massive RPGs where you have to keep up with characters and lore, strategy titles where you must balance various resources, population needs, and military threats, or the city builders where you’re constantly balancing the needs of your citizens and production ratios. Crudely put, these are “thinking man’s games”.

A surreal depiction of contorted Eiffel Tower. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It’s a game I really want to play, but at this moment I know I won’t be able to immerse myself in the world as much as I’d want to.

No, I don’t mean to imply that games I play make me smart, or that I’m so smart that I play smarty-pants games - what I mean is that I’m used to putting a little bit of work into my leisure. Look, sometimes I might take written notes to keep track of convoluted plots or new characters, draw up a map to understand my surroundings, or I might read up on some historical military tactic to test out in a Total War game. I approach the games I play deliberately, and the work I put in pays off in increased enjoyment I get from playing them.

There’s some defensiveness I have around the games I play, and I think it has to do with how we - gamers, humans - construct our identities around our hobbies and the media we consume. This is no different from metalheads calling pop music garbage, and George R. R. Martin’s fans eschewing young adult fiction. Well, now I’m struggling with my own identity as a gamer, and how the games I play fit in with the way I see myself.

My love for deep, complex games has been in conflict with how I’m able to play games now: in small chunks, on a tiny handheld device, where I might need to stop at a moment’s notice - because the little one is tossing and turning a little too much and I need to help her stay asleep. Oh yeah, babies have nightmares sometimes and it’s equally adorable and sad, although it’s a lot more adorable when your kiddo sees you and calms down because you’re nearby and make her feel safe. But I digress.

Here’s some context for you if you don’t have kids: when they’re little, you really have to keep an eye on them nearly every second they’re awake. Unless you put them in a baby cage of some sort, although they will still find a way to hurt themselves if you’re not looking. The bastards are mobile, lightning fast, and are terrible at every action they execute. You can throw your child in front of a device, which I’m sure will solve the “crawling around too much” problem, but that’s a terrible idea, because we want them to move, and we want them to touch and lick things, and sitting in front of a screen accomplished none of those things. So yeah, parents of infants are only free during nap times or when the other parent takes over.

Handheld retro console Anbernic RG35XX Pro, with Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped booted up. Anbernic RG35XX Pro, a cheap, but surprisingly powerful retro handheld.

Handheld gaming. I have three handheld devices: Valve’s Steam Deck, the original Nintendo Switch, and Anbernic RG35XX Pro. My relationship with each device has changed.

I love my Steam Deck, and it’s been my daily driver for a few years (both in handheld and docked mode) - but that changed after my daughter was born. Steam Deck is big and heavy: holding it in one hand, if even for a minute, is really uncomfortable. I boinked my sleeping child with it more times than I’m willing to admit. The instant shutdown/resume function isn’t always reliable and doesn’t work in every game, adding to friction. And if I happen to be in a living room, then docking to a TV (where sometimes you have to restart the game to update the resolution), connecting a controller - it’s all a hustle, and it’s never smooth. It’s a great device, if only because I can access my Steam library anywhere, but the user experience leaves much to be desired - which is now a big deal, since every second I spend fiddling with something is a second I could be gaming. I got no time for these shenanigans.

I kept trying to make Steam Deck work, kept bonking my daughter’s head, booting up big and dense games like Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, because admitting it didn’t work for me is admitting I had changed as a gamer.

Nintendo Switch is better in every regard: docking is quick and instant, and external gamepads pair instantly. The device is much lighter and the chance of hitting my child on a head is reduced. I enjoy the Switch overall as a dad-device, and I often pick and play the device when I’m in the living room and my daughter’s asleep next to me.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning character in blue lightning-infused weapon facing a wooden gate. Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning has lots of gear, skills, and quests, but ultimately none of the decisions are that impactful, and unless you’ve got special kind of OCD - it’s a simple game.

On Switch, I’ve been playing Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. It’s a type of a game I wouldn’t really play before I had a kid - I find it a bit mindless. Think Fable-meets-MMO-quests. It’s the closest thing there is to offline World of Warcraft, but without the people, and with more generic world. But I find myself enjoying the game, because the arrows shows me exactly where to go, combat’s just engaging enough, and the plot’s either irrelevant, nonexistent, or I clearly didn’t pay attention (it’s definitely the latter). It’s really a looter shooter disguised as an RPG, and I’m eating this up because in my mind I’m an RPG player, and that’s more “me” than booting up Destiny, or the new Borderlands.

You see - I’m holding onto the idea that I can still play my RPGs, even if it is Kingdoms of Amalur and the like.

Eventually I went even smaller and bought a retro console. Nintendo Switch is perfect, and there are many bite sized and simple games, but it doesn’t quite fit in my pocket, and sometimes it takes up just a tiny bit more space than my infant allows me - especially if she’s holding onto my hand for comfort and I can’t really get a comfortable grip.

King's Field 1 (the Japanese release) - a low polygon skeleton attacking the player in a dungeon. King’s Field is a key piece of gaming history - a precursor to Dark Souls, a largely unforgiving dungeon crawler. But I can’t exactly whip out a piece of paper and a pencil needed to meaningfully make my way through the game.

Meet Anbernic RG35XX Pro, which has many things going for itself, but first and foremost it’s the unbeatable price at $50 - $65. Which is ridiculous for a device that can play every console game up to and including PlayStation 1, a subset of PlayStation Portable titles, and various PC ports through PortMaster, including - wait for it - Morrowind. And while I naturally gravitated to the latter, it might be the most ergonomic experience with its 3.5 inch screen and I’m forced to play other games. So I promptly ignored Morrowind in favor of my childhood favorites - like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon.

The library is huge for PlayStation 1 alone - from calm farming sims like Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, to complex RPGs like Final Fantasy VII or Vagrant Story. There are even the Souls-likes, or specifically From Software’s first stab at the genre, with King’s Field and Shadow Tower. Yet, I find myself booting up platformers and simple shooters, games I wouldn’t normally care to play these days.

“Not because there’s anything wrong with those games” is what I feel compelled to write, and that’s because my identity as a “hardcore gamer” is really on the line here. In front of myself and nobody else, naturally, since I’m my own harshest critic. Be it unresolved childhood trauma (hello mom, you always told me video games are a waste of time), or just preferences - it feels like my decade of Dark Souls runs gets invalidated the moment I boot up Spyro the Dragon.

Gaming is my safe haven, my own flavor of a hobby I don’t want to “trivialize” or “cheapen” - which really has a way of robbing myself from enjoying my limited gaming time. Yes, I might not be honing my skill against a difficult boss, unraveling a secret plot, or employing new military tactics - but I’m figuring out how to meaningfully enjoy my favorite pastime - sleep-deprived, occasionally one-handed, and in inconsistent bursts.

Last night my little one fell asleep in my hands, my trusty retro handheld was within reach, and I finally managed to beat the racing level in Crash Bandicoot 3 (you know the one), the level that gave me oh-so-much trouble as a kid. And that felt great, and that counts.

Oh, and you might enjoy a last time I explored rediscovering gaming as a new parent.