Playing PC games on inappropriate displays looks like it is becoming a trend in late 2025. Last month, we saw a PC enthusiast playing Battlefield 6 on the tiny circular screen of a CPU liquid cooler. Today, we spotted a YouTuber who had decided any type of conventional monitor or screen had to be snubbed. Instead, Smilly recorded themselves enjoying a bit of Minecraftusing a printer as their sole viewport into the famously blocky game’s universe.
playing Minecraft on a printer... #gaming #gamingclips #minecraft #funny - YouTube
Above, you can see and hear that Smilly isn't having the happiest time in Minecraft, via his high contrast paper-spooled view of the game world.
The receipt printer provides surprisingly rapid updates, which is a welcome feature for any gaming "display." But it isn’t the ‘refresh rate’, which we'd hazard is around 0.5 frames per second, that seems to be frustrating the YouTuber.
Rather, we hear Smilly venting frustratedly about what is (and isn’t) visible in the game world, due to the stark contrasty monochromatic nature of the printouts.
Occasionally, audio clues help give the video gaming fan an idea of what is going on, but such clues are fleeting at best.
I'll just check my inven... (Image credit: smilly)
“Oh…. Sh*t.”
Mid-video clip, Smilly seems to be settling more comfortably into the black and white super-contrasty world he is adventuring within. But then matters get worse. “I need to go to the inventory now,” states our printer-vision-restricted hero, flatly. Switching to his inventory view shows… an unrecognizable shape surrounded by a murky gray nothingness. “Oh…. Sh*t.”
Gamers enjoy pushing the limits
As we mentioned in the intro, gamers, particularly those on the more open platform of the PC, have long adventured into strange realms. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention – so you might use your tiny secondary display as your main monitor when the latter is in for repair, or on loan, or whatever.
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More and more, though, we see gaming boundaries pushed simply 'because it's there.' That’s certainly the case here, and there's a wealth of prior examples of getting Doom to run on inappropriate gadgets like pregnancy test devices, keyboard keycaps, lawn mowers, and more.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
