CULTURE WAR

Why did the PC gaming community learn to hate prebuilt computers?

- Luke Winkie

A dust-capped Alienware Aurora whirrs underneath my desk. It arrived with turquoise accents, onyx plates and an array of parts pre-assembled by the boutique manufacturer. I’ve never constructed my own machine by hand. For many years, I did the majority of my gaming on a laptop, which was packed with so much tech that it felt like hauling a cement block around in my backpack. But in 2020, I decided to take a formal jump into the hobby. The Aurora is a no-doubts-about-it gaming PC. At last, I had finally seen the way, the truth, and the light.

So why did I still feel like a bit of a fraud? Because I knew that the purest distillation of PC gaming – its Platonic Ideal – has nothing to do with the games themselves. To truly feel like I belonged I needed to piece together the guts of a machine like Lego blocks, snapping the graphics cards and RAM into place, before the moment of truth where I pressed the power button and hoped that everything fired without a hitch. A prebuilt, on the other hand, remains anathema to the lifers.

BATTLE LINES

Confirmation of this bias is everywhere. On the r/PCMasterRace subreddit you can watch ASMR-tinged videos of RAM installation. A meme on the forum claims that prebuilt machines are overpriced, and could burn down your house. This dynamic has persisted across generations of gamers, despite the fact that Alienware owners and Newegg snipers have almost everything else in common. How did they learn to resent each other?

“My family bought our first PC in 1995 and over the years it became a Frankenstein’s monster of parts scavenged from computers we brought home from our local dump,” says Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Entertainment, which resuscitates out-of-print PC classics (and a remake of