The company’s latest gaming furniture is designed to bring you closer to the action when you play and blend into your living room when you’re not. Something that is great when you’re an adult and have a house where you live with other people and receive visitors. And Ikea has wanted to bet, as always.
When one thinks of “gaming furniture”, a very specific aesthetic probably comes to mind. Aggressive designs, RGB lighting, and, for some reason, seats that seem to belong to a racing car. It’s an aesthetic that doesn’t fit well with most living spaces.
That is something that Ikea wants to change with its new line of furniture for gamers. But that raises a question: where exactly do games fit into the modern home?
Furniture for gaming and for adult life, no need to choose
Playing video games, as an activity, has rarely had spaces designed around it. Instead, it has been installed in other spaces of the house, adapting to what those rooms already were. Video game consoles are installed in living rooms designed to be comfortable spaces for watching TV. And the PC imitates the posture of a home office, primarily designed for working several hours in front of the computer.
This has been good to a large extent, but sometimes it forces us to look for increasingly complicated accessories to make sitting on the sofa with a laptop more comfortable. The new Brännboll collection from Ikea is designed to bridge the gap between traditional living spaces and the specific postural needs of gamers.
At first glance, Ikea’s game collection doesn’t seem very different from most of its range, with vibrant colors and minimalist designs. However, if you look closer, there are some strange options that don’t make sense immediately. Until you imagine playing on the furniture.
For example, the Gaming Lounge Chair is made up of two square cushions for the seat and a third one for the backrest. The seat is flanked by a pair of tube arms, with two wheels at the front. It sits almost too low on the floor, and the lower cushions can be unfolded to lower it even more and allow the legs to stretch out.
It’s a strange design, until one imagines oneself adopting that slumped posture that occurs when sliding down in the seat during a several-hour gaming session.
A large part of Ikea’s game collection is designed with this type of posture in mind. The Gaming Easy Chair is equally low, with a molded mesh seat suspended on a metal frame. It is designed to adapt to the natural rocking that gamers often do when they immerse themselves in a game. “It’s like our innovative version of a rocking chair, but instead you rock,” they say at Ikea.
The idea of gaming furniture designed to accommodate long gaming sessions, anticipate disasters before they happen, and be flexible enough to transform into “normal” furniture when not needed is an evolution that many of us were asking for. Now it’s a reality.
