HIP TO BE SQUARE

The rise and fall of the gamer aesthetic

- Phil Iwaniuk

In 1965, Coco Chanel said, “Mode passes, style remains,” and while the iconic fashion house founder probably didn’t have RGB standing desks or Razer Boomslangs in mind as she said it, it’s just as pertinent to our own strange little corner of cultural expression as it is to high fashion. Over the last decade we’ve seen a very distinctive visual theme emerge from PC hardware, one drenched in multicoloured lighting, scribbled with tribal designs like a lower league rugby player’s arms, and built from black plastic into severe, angular shapes. The gamer aesthetic had us all in its thrall throughout the 2010s, but now manufacturers are steering away from it in favour of sleeker, more sophisticated product designs. Its days may be drawing to a close.

It existed at all because for so long beforehand PC gaming felt like sneaking in behind enemy lines and performing covert ops on beige machinery designed for much more sensible, productive pursuits. Indeed, that landscape of office-friendly, off-white hardware and peripherals is probably what prompted – ahem – gamer gear to take on such garish forms when it did emerge. Nobody knew quite how to sell home computers for about the first 20 years. They were boxes of amazing, unprecedented computational power, and they could do all sorts. But what should their manufacturers lead with when trying to convince people to swap large piles of money for them?

ALL WORK, NO STRAFE