Finding yourself with a spare room at home is an exciting opportunity. This is a chance for your own personality and subjective preferences to really shine. Are you someone who wants to use this space to cultivate a library with calming and peaceful reading nooks? Or are you more interested in the realm of digital entertainment? If that second option appeals to you more, you might even want to narrow that interest down further, for instance, by looking into a gaming room.
This doesn’t have to refer exclusively to video games either. Running your eyes over possible options for this part of your home can blast the door wide open on the kind of space that it can ultimately become.
Physical Games
If you’re hoping that this is going to be a communal space where you can bring your friends in order to relax and have fun, you might want to imbue it with more variety than you had previously planned. Including physical games as well as video games can mean that this becomes a multi-purpose area where people can do their own thing while spending time together.
Which games to include, however? You might think of arcade machines, containing classics like Pacman or Space Invaders, but that might not count as truly physical. Instead, think about examples like cornhole boards or perhaps a ball or bean bag that you can play catch with. In terms of the former, you can even customize such additions so that they blend with the overall aesthetic, through the addition of personalized cornhole boards.
Comfortable Seating
The idea of sitting down and enjoying a game that you’re currently hooked on might be much more appealing with a TV that can do justice to the visuals and a sound system that can let the audio breathe (more on that later), but there’s something just as important that you might be neglecting. Having seating that is comfortable, but also supportive of your back is going to make a big impact in terms of how long you want to stay there and carry on playing. Furthermore, walking away from time spent playing games only to find yourself in long-term discomfort because of your seating isn’t an ideal situation.
When you’re finding the right seating, it’s not just about the quality of the chair or sofa (though that obviously is very important); it’s also about the positioning compared to the TV and how your neck has to be positioned – aiming for something that’s eye-level might be a better approach.
The Right Sound Systems
If you aren’t considering a decent sound system for the video games that you’re planning on playing, you might not be giving enough credit to the sound design that can come into play in those experiences. This isn’t just the music, though that in itself is something worth discussing, but the sounds themselves that layer together in order to create an iconic and unique identity for any given game that you play. Depriving yourself of these entirely can remove something essential from the experience, and that means that the right sound system can help you to enhance it in a certain way. You might even like to have both the option of a speaker and high-quality headphones, so that you can switch based on your mood or depending on whether or not you’re entertaining guests.
On the topic of music in games, however, you might already be aware of how core this component is to the end result. However, if you do need convincing, then you need to look no further than the scores of acclaimed gaming soundtracks, both classic and new, that showcase how passionately people feel about this particular aspect of sound design.
Hospitality Considerations
Once again, thinking about this room as a social space can turn your attention to certain considerations that you might not have thought about when you only viewed it as a place to play games. Chief among these might be hospitality considerations, such as food and drinks that you can store in that room without needing to keep going back and forth to the rest of the house. Water is important, and will be especially so if you’re spending a lot of time looking at a screen, meaning that a cooler could be an essential component.
Beyond this, though, implementing a mini fridge (or a regular-sized fridge) can allow you to store as much food and drink as you want when people come to visit – or even just for yourself when you’re spending time enjoying the setup that you’ve accomplished.