Handheld gaming is better with a pillow

In the past few years, I’ve become a devoted handheld gamer. I know I’m not the only one; the Nintendo Switch remains Nintendo’s bestselling console of all time, and the Switch 2 is finally picking up steam thanks to Pokopia. I also love my Steam Deck, especially since I've set it up to stream not only games from my PC, but also from my Xbox and PS5. All of this means I can lounge on the couch playing games while not-really-watching something on TV in the background, while sitting next to my wife who is doing the exact same thing on either her Switch or Steam Deck.

Here’s the problem: Handheld gaming really starts to hurt after a while.

It’s not like this with a regular game controller, at least not as much. I usually keep a game controller down in my lap while I play, rather than holding it up in the air. After all, you don’t really need to look at a game controller while you play a game; you look at the screen in front of you, which is hopefully set at a proper ergonomic height.

Not so with handheld gaming. Much like how working on a laptop for extended time periods will hurt your neck, so too will playing games for an extended period on a handheld. If you rest it on your lap, you’re going to hurt your neck and shoulders bending down to look at the screen. But if you hold it up in the air, your arms and wrists will start to cramp. I used to hoist up my knees and rest my handheld devices on them, but that position isn’t comfortable for very long, at least not for me.

At some point, I started getting served ads online for gamer pillows. I was not convinced by any of them. Why? Because I couldn't get over how freaking silly these pillows look.

The pillow in the image above doesn't look that comfortable. It has a flat surface for balancing your devices on, so you’d still have to support the weight of your handheld by tilting it up slightly.

The bigger problem was in my own mind, actually. Not to get too deep with it, but when I look back on the time period before I got a gamer pillow, I think I didn't believe I deserved to feel comfortable, especially if it made me look silly. Buying a gamer pillow felt somehow extravagant, even absurd. On some level, I think I saw it as my own fault for spending so much time playing video games, and so I deserved to suffer. I acknowledge that none of this makes any damn sense, especially given what I do for a living! But internalized shame over gaming too much is some real hard shit sometimes.

Luckily for me, my wife solved the entire psychological problem I was having by surprise-purchasing two gamer pillows — one for each of us — from a small business called Mechanism. Now we use our pillows almost every single day. Yeah, they look a little silly, but who cares? We’re in the comfort of our own home. And I can truly say “comfort,” because this pillow is designed in such a way that you can actually be comfortable while playing a handheld gaming console.

I ended up talking about the Mechanism pillow on my gaming podcast Triple Click, and in so doing, I found out that the guy who owns the business listens to my podcast (small world). He ended up going to a Triple Click live show and giving me a couple of extra attachments for free. I feel the need to disclose all of that because of my journalistic ethics, but I also want to stress that my wife purchased these pillows herself without my knowledge, and that we already loved them way before I got anything for free. I do sound like an advertisement when I talk about how much I love this pillow, but it’s all real.

All that said, you don’t even need to buy an official gamer pillow to get a similar effect. You can actually just stack up a couple of couch pillows and immediately improve your handheld gaming experience. You’re still going to be bending your neck to look at the screen, to some degree, but it’ll help reduce the strain in your wrists and arms. If you end up using this method for a long time and you like it, then it might be worth considering an upgrade to an actual gamer pillow.

Above all, don’t wait as long as I did to solve this problem for yourself. Even after all these years of playing games, including many years of playing them for my job, I still feel some weird shame about buying expensive gaming stuff sometimes. But guess what? This is a hobby that means a lot to me, and to you, if you’re reading this. And unfortunately, it’s a hobby that puts strain on our bodies. That doesn’t mean we have to game less, per se. It just means we have to be owith looking a little bit silly in the name of comfort. But hey, if we all do it together, then it’s not that silly anymore, is it?