In decades past, gaming was a pretty straightforward experience: you’d grab your console, get comfortable, and start playing. That worked well enough for us all for many years, but today the gaming experience is more dynamic than ever before. Now, gamers commonly make decisions about everything from seating options to audio preferences, all to cater to their own preferences.
Considering this, we want to look into a few of the more creative ways to customize your gaming experience, and truly make it your own.
1. Build Your Own Chair
We just mentioned that some of gamers’ decisions regarding customized experiences have to do with seating options. To clarify, it’s actually become quite common for gamers to invest in special chairs that make for comfortable and versatile seating for long gaming sessions. A number of years ago, this might have sounded somewhat strange; gaming chairs existed, but they weren’t necessarily mainstream — reserved instead for only the most avid and intense gamers. Now, however, investing in a gaming chair is considered to be perfectly ordinary.
But customizing a gaming chair can be even better, because it can leave you with a unique piece of furniture that doubles as a one-of-a-kind accessory. We’ve gone over how to build a DIY gaming chair in detail before, and while it’s definitely a tricky task that will require some personal education and patience, it can be done. In the end, you may just have a chair that makes your gaming time feel like a whole new activity.
2. Design a Gaming Room
Chairs may be trendy for gamers these days. But if you really want to craft a unique experience, you may want to build up a room around your gaming chair as well. This may mean anything from adjusting lighting, to investing in a new TV or monitor, to arranging surround sound speakers. You can find a lot of tips for setting up a gaming room, and a lot of them are pretty great — such as the idea of soundproofing the room (so you can really crank it up) or building in accent lighting. But ultimately your gaming room should reflect personal taste and preferences. We’d recommend taking in a lot of tips and looking through examples, and then using that research to piece together your ideal gaming space.
3. Customize Your Controller Electronics
For some gamers, the ultimate customization comes in the form of building a one-of-a-kind controller or keyboard. This comes down in part to mechanical and design choices: a frame for the controls, keycaps or button colors for keyboards or controllers, and so on. But to really make a custom controller, you can learn your way around printed circuit board design and actually construct the internal electrical mechanisms that make these devices work the way they do.
This may sound like a very difficult thing to do, but in actuality PCB design is something you can learn to do through fairly intuitive software. On top of that, there are also easily accessible designs for existing circuit boards in controllers and keyboards — meaning you can essentially work off of a template and tweak things as you see fit. From there, you can use a free gerber file editor, which is basically a way of converting a software-based PCB design into a file that can be used for physical manufacturing. At the end of this process, you will have created an electrical brain for your controller, which will make said controller function exactly the way you want it to, within reason.
4. Blog About It
The previous three ideas all had to do with customizing the way in which you actually play games. But you can also further enhance your experience by getting a little bit more socially active about your gaming. This can mean interacting on message boards, chat systems, or social media — but if you really want to get creative about it, you can also consider starting your own gaming blog. Look through some of the best gaming blogs out there and you’ll find all kinds of creative, informative, and often amusing insights. Developing and sharing your own can help you get even more out of your experience — and may even help you develop a little bit of a business out of it.
There are plenty more ways to customize a gaming experience, particularly when you get into the actual games themselves. But consider some of these ideas as a good start, and in short time you may get a whole new level of enjoyment and satisfaction out of your gaming.
