Gaming identity, parenting, and handhelds

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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”.

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…