Amazon Gaming Chair

Someone on Twitter asked a question that gave me an extremely rare idea for a blog post that I haven’t already covered before: Gaming Chairs.

Much of the past 12 months I’ve been plagued by back troubles that have ranged anywhere from mildly annoying to severely crippling. The thing that triggers this back pain the most is: Sitting in a chair in front of a desktop PC. You know, the thing I have done all day, every day for most of my life.

Currently, I can’t spend more than about 30 minutes in a chair in front of my PC before I start to feel uncomfortable. On a good day, I can get up and do some stretches or move around or something and return to the chair in a short time. On a bad day, I’ve strained a back muscle or something and have to spend the next several days recuperating, flat on my back. Fortunately I’ve been having more good days than bad days lately. I’ve observed that if I spend too much time at the PC before noon, I’m much, much more likely to hurt myself. I suppose that it takes that long for my back to “warm up.”

It’s a big reason why I haven’t been blogging as much, too. Most of my best creative ideas and mental thoughts occur in the morning. It’s when I usually have ideas for writing. The exact time when I can’t do anything with them because I can’t sit in a chair in front of a computer without hurting myself. So I tend to put them off, and they never get done.

It’s one reason I put so much effort into my Sekiro videos before and Bloodborne videos now. It’s the easiest form of creative expression I have right now. Someday I might turn to vlogging not because I particularly think it’s anything that I want to do or that people want to see but because I won’t have any choice.

But I’m making an exception for this post. I’m sitting in the living room chair this morning tapping away on this accursed Chromebook which I hope to soon replace (another subject). This is also dangerous if I keep it up for too long, because it’s impossible to avoid hunching over in front of a laptop. Especially since I can barely read the screen. But I digress.

You might be thinking to yourself, “Well obviously you need a standing desk!” Ah, standing. The thing that’s even worse on my back than sitting. Yes, standing up in front of a screen causes even more pain than sitting. I’ve tried. Fifteen minutes tops before I’m in pain. It’s the standing still that hurts so much. Maybe if I had one of those treadmill desk things, but those are meant only for the super rich.

So the point of all this is to say that I bought a cheap Amazon gaming chair several months ago to try it out. So I have some thoughts on “gaming chairs.” At least this one.

I have found it to be somewhat better than the office utility chair I was using before. You can adjust the height of the chair, and you can adjust the angle of the back. The feature that seems unique to these “gaming chairs” are those two little adjustable pillow pads for the lower back and neck.

I have found the lower pad somewhat useful, but I got rid of the upper one for the neck because I could never get it in a good position and it moves around anyway. They are held in place by elastic straps that go around the back of the chair. It’s a cheap chair, made out of cheap materials, so I didn’t expect much there. But at $129 it was far cheaper than the super ergonomic office chairs I was investigating that tend to be closer to the $1000 price range.

I added a chair pad to the seat because it was kind of hard for me, and I put a square pillow behind my upper back for better support. So you can take that as a small commentary on the comfort of the base chair for me.

Overall I would say it’s been a mild improvement to my chair situation. But I can’t say that I would rave about it. I don’t understand why it’s a “gaming” chair at all, for example. I suppose there are people in life who lean way back in chairs to play games, but I can’t imagine doing that for a PC mouse and keyboard game, for example, which is what I play most of the time. Perhaps for a console game, but for me, leaning back too far is extremely uncomfortable.

Anyway, it’s a post. Let’s publish this thing before I forget about it.