Mia Chen

Mia's first console was a hand-me-down GameCube with a drifting stick, and she maintains that fixing it herself at age nine set the whole thing in motion. She spent her teens haunting hardware forums, built her first PC with a summer job's savings and a lot of prayer, and has been taking gaming machines apart ever since. Covering the industry professionally for the past several years just made the obsession billable.

On the news desk she chases platform stories, release-date archaeology and the business decisions publishers hope nobody reads too closely. On the hardware side she has strong, occasionally unpopular opinions: linear switches are overrated, most people should buy the mid-range monitor, and cable management is self-care.

Off the clock she plays strategy games badly on purpose, keeps a spreadsheet ranking every keyboard she has ever typed on (currently 47 entries), and refuses to tell anyone her actual mouse grip because the arguments last for hours. She lives with a cat named Miso who has opinions about warm laptops.