I may have upgraded from a clunky CRT monitor to a 4K ultrawide and from instant ramen to a halfway respectable diet, but some things don’t change. I’m still a gamer. Always will be. You can slap on the titles — IT Administrator, cybersecurity whatever, network engineer-in-training, master’s degree candidate — but peel them off and underneath is the same kid who thought saving the princess or killing the final boss was a life mission.
Life grows heavy with passwords, budgets, and meetings where people talk for an hour without saying anything. You get older, slower, maybe smarter if you’re lucky. Your thumbs aren’t as fast, your back complains if you sit too long, and you now measure game time not in hours but in “how much sleep will I lose if I click continue?” And yet… there’s still that heartbeat, steady and stupid, that speeds up the second a loading screen fades.
I’ve fought enough real-world “bosses” to know that pixelated ones are far more honest. At least in games the enemy isn’t pretending to be your friend before stabbing you with “budget cuts” or “new priorities.” Out here, the loot is lousy — more work for the same pay — while in-game, you get an enchanted sword and bragging rights.
Don’t mistake this for nostalgia. Nostalgia is for people who quit and look back wistfully. This is commitment. I still log in, still respawn, still make bad decisions that cost me three hours of progress and keep going anyway. And that’s why gamers make better survivors than most — we’re used to failure, grinding, and the sick joy of trying again just to get it right.
The Arsenal
Some people collect watches, I collect machines that eat time.
At home, I’ve got the Lenovo Legion gaming laptop — a nuclear-powered war machine disguised as a laptop. It runs everything from triple-A titles to my own reckless experiments with mods that inevitably break them. The fans roar like an F-16 on takeoff, the chassis gets hot enough to fry an egg, and I love it like an accomplice in crime.
When I leave the house, I downshift to the Lenovo Legion handheld. Same logo, different battlefield. It’s the assassin’s blade to the laptop’s siege cannon — smaller screen, fewer keys, but the same dangerous truth: give me ten spare minutes and I’ll vanish into another world.
And then there’s the wildcard: the Miyoo Mini Plus. A retro handheld so small it could fit in a coat pocket and so powerful it could pull me back to the 90s with one click of the D-pad. Its graphics are charmingly pixelated, the buttons click like old typewriter keys, and the battery life politely reminds me that happiness is fleeting. But every time I fire it up, I’m hunched over a screen again, chasing just one more try like it’s oxygen.
This isn’t about hardware. It’s about identity. One machine is a fortress, one is a scalpel, and one is a time machine. Together they are proof — whether I’m at my desk, in a coffee shop, or killing time before a meeting — that I’m not just “still” a gamer. I’m a gamer who’s learned to wage war across decades and devices.
Because when the game over screen comes for me, I’ll still try to find the restart button. And if it doesn’t exist, I’ll mod one in.