i thought i replied to this ask but i guess i didn't, so: i have three answers to this.
-
yeah
-
we are past the point where "weird computer" makes sense. we're past the point where "weird phone or tablet" makes sense. we have polished most of the edges off of computing, and except for minor things that don't even count as innovations (put more FUCKING buttons on the phones! put more FUCKING switches on them! stop taking them OFF and put more ON) the fundamental components of computing are pretty much figured out, and that's a good thing. it's good that most computers are pretty much interchangeable, and a lot of our pining for "weird computers" is really pining for being part of a frontier that was tamed by the time many of us were in our teens, if we were born at all.
-
gamer computers are the only thing keeping computing interesting
#3 is very important. gamers are the only reason you can buy a keyboard that isn't a rubber pad and a membrane. gamers are the only reason your mouse doesn't have a 300dpi non-laser optical sensor. gamers are the only reason you can buy a power supply with clean rails all the way up to 1500W, modular cables, caps that don't die after a year, and adequate ventilation.
"gamer chairs are stupid" before gamer chairs the only thing you could buy (unless you had $1200 for a herman miller) was an office depot special. every store sold the same one, and they were all the same cheap black pleather. six months after you bought it, the leather was cracked and the tilt mechanism had bent internally so the chair always hung at a five degree angle to the left. the back was held on to the seat by the ABS plastic armrests and if you leaned back too hard, they would snap in half and dump you on your ass.
a lot of gamer chairs suck shit, but there are some that don't. secretlab is treated like the raid shadow legendzzz of chairs, but they sell the only chair I've literally ever sat in, other than a steelcase, that didn't feel like it was going to fall apart, and then later did in fact fall apart. i have a titan XL that has stood up to two years of abuse without any of the usual failures, except for the inevitable rumpling of the armrests.
secretlab is a shitty company! as much as any other! their advertising campaigns are gross in their content, tone and quantity. their designs are also terrible - if I wanted a chair with a given videogame on it, I would be so disappointed with theirs. they clearly employ no actual designers, it's just slapdash copy and paste license bullshit. also, i wrote about how i bought a new revision of the same chair and it's garbage now. they definitely pulled the usual modern-age-of-shit bait and switch, where they made a product that was better than everything else for a year in order to build goodwill, then cut costs and are now living on the word of mouth they generated. it'll be five years before anyone notices their product got worse. but at least they made something good, once. i lived through almost 15 years of the before times, and this simply never happened.
before Corsair made "RGB gamer bullshit" an entire market segment, you simply couldn't buy... anything. nobody made anything. it was just a handful of zombie brands like belkin, selling relabeled china sludge. there were literally no keyboards in brick and mortar or online stores that were not membrane based. you had one choice of mouse, in ten different cheap plastic cases. logitech was as bad as anything else, they were just a little sturdier.
i don't think you could buy an AIO water cooler for any price, anywhere, in 2010. you had to build it from parts and then the seals failed and destroyed your PC 100% of the time. nobody had high refresh rate monitors back then, but they never would have made them for "enthusiasts"; only gaming made the expense worth it.
do i love that all this stuff is explicitly "gamer"? no! of course not! i much prefer my first response - we should have weirder stuff, etc. but this is my "we are unfortunately mired in capitalism" response: under the economic system that is likely to persist for the rest of our lives, we are forced to thank Gamers for making computers good, at all.
I think about this a lot, sitting on my gamer chair, with my gamer keyboard, mouse, mousepad, headset, monitor, and more. But here's the thing. I'm 6'4". I don't get ANY options in my size for normal consumer products most of the time. My desk* is the one place I can afford to be comfortable. They make things that are either with enough options, or adjustable enough, that I can actually not literally crush and destroy them.
*My desk is a 6 person ikea dining table. It looks like a normal desk until sit an average sized person at it.
