Ways to Incorporate Your Love of Gaming into Your New Home
In the immortal words of some guy on TikTok, “Living alone is pretty great, the only problem is I now have access to adult money, which means I now get to buy stuff like this…”
Today’s “this” is a gaming room. Very common in that trend. To outsiders, gaming is a childish hobby, so staying true to what you love and having an adult home isn’t the easiest thing. But don’t worry, we’ve got lots of ideas for making your “adult home” into a gamers paradise.
Think about style
If you want to do this right, you’ll have to go all in. Having a gaming PC in the corner of a bedroom, perhaps with the colour changing LED lights or a neon sign nearby is child’s play. You’re not going to stand out amongst the thousands of Twitch gaming streamers that way, and what’s more, you’re sure to get a comment of your mother/mother-in-law.
Instead, theme the entire room’s style around somewhere where you might find gamers. There are a few different routes here. Shelves full of games and books and figurines with posters is one way to go, but so is the Speakeasy style. Add a bar, a few stools, a pool table or a Bartop Arcade Machine and you’ve got the hottest hangout for gamer pals.
Make it multipurpose
Along the same lines, incorporating something else into your gaming room will mean that you can get a lot of use out of it, and perhaps avoid the stares again from the mother-in-law. It’s not a game room, it’s a general hangout area complete with books, sofa, musical instruments, and the like, that just happens to have a gaming corner.
You can take that gaming corner aspect much further. Look around your home and see if there is a little nook you can take advantage of. Install shelves for a TV and console, add a smaller mattress and more fluffy stuff and you’ll have a fun place to hang out when you need a moment alone.
You can make your gaming room more multifunctional by being careful about the table you have. If you buy something versatile, or even specially made, you can have a dining table and ping pong table in one.
Or transform your entire room into a home cinema. Buy yourself a projector, get some squishy seats, and hook your console up to the projector. Not only will you have a massive screen to play on to fully get the gameplay experience, but you can swap out games for movies and have a weekly movie night with the family or roommates.
Posters
If you’re interested in keeping non-nerdy style, but you can’t help but let your nerdy side out, you can think of displaying them in posters. A lot of posters that you’ll buy in Game or entertainment retail stores are cartoonish and fit the style of the fandom, but a lot of abstract art is coming out that you can style into odes to Zelda (or Link), Super Mario, Star Wars, etc.
For example, there is lots of variations on the famed photo of Lunch Atop a Skyscraper out there, that features the Muppets, the cast of Friends and more. If you get creative with your style, you can hide fandom in art that looks like it should be in Louvre to the outsider. And there are plenty of Instagram artists who would be happy to give it a go if you want to commission a piece.
Think about the neighbours
Unfortunately, just about every idea of what you can incorporate into your gaming room, pool, music, console games, foosball tables, movies, etc. all makes a bit of noise. If you have any immediate neighbours nearby, you might want to think about soundproofing your new den. Luckily, it’s quite simple to buy and attach acoustic tiles for walls, which are also renter friendly, so you don’t wake up the neighbours when you’re a couple of hours into The Last of Us II. They will hear the crack as your heart breaks.
Think about yourself too
The stereotype of gamers isn’t pleasant. Think South Park’s World of Warcraft episode Make Love, Not Warcraft. We don’t get enough sun, we’re sitting alone, and we’re here for the long haul.
Being alone gets solved by involving another element in the room, like we have mentioned. You can add a sofa or a bar and make it a more communal space, but you can do yourself a favour by installing a skylight. You’ll get a lot of natural light into a room that doesn’t always have to be in total darkness. Vitamin D is important for your immune system, so open it when the glare isn’t on your screen and you’ll keep your immersive experience, just not in total darkness.
As for being there for the long haul, we all know you’re spending more than the recommended amount of time playing games. In the same position. In the same chair. You must feel like an old lawn chair cracked open when you stand. The most important item a gamer can invest in is a decent chair. You’ll need support for the long hours you’re putting into getting that trophy. Office workers are repeatedly getting told they need a good chair to avoid long-term damage to their backs, so do gamers.
