It's starting to look like my current work from home arrangement, which has always been described as temporary, is about to slide into permanent status. This led me to do some thinking about acquiring new equipment to improve my home office. One critical item on my shopping list is a chair - I currently don't have a real chair, working through a combination of standing, lying down, and sitting on the floor. It's been perfectly adequate, in fact I actually prefer it to having a proper desk, but it's worth considering if I permanently work from my apartment. As I thought about it, I came up with a surprising hypothesis - the best type of office chair might actually be a gaming chair. The key to my thinking was a realization that companies and gamers are likely to think differently about chairs, which suggests certain possibilities regarding how the market will influence the eventual characteristics of the products.
In the office, equipment is generally regarded as a necessary evil, and this enables a common mentality that expenses should be driven to the lowest possible level. The best example I can think of to illustrate my point is the story about how Amazon's early desks were recycled doors - apparently, Jeff Bezos went to a Home Depot and calculated that attaching legs to a door was cheaper than buying a desk. This cute story makes a point about cutting costs but it requires the reader to accept an unstated assumption - the type of desk has minimal effect on performance. The reverse of this mentality is that an office will invest in equipment if it improves performance, which is why organizations buy top of the line computers for its design staff. But as far as I know, there is no company out there gaining a performance advantage due to its office chairs, and I suspect if it were otherwise we would know about it. When a company feels like its success can be explained by their office chairs, we'll find out the minute someone like Malcolm Gladwell publishes the story.
On the other hand, the gaming environment is defined by tiny factors, implying that equipment is no exception in terms of competitors looking for an edge. This insight is based on a gamer I know who does speed runs - he tries to break records for completing certain games or levels in the fastest time. The details he describes to me reinforce the theme that every second counts. I once sat down with him to watch a few examples of players speed running games I'd played in my childhood. The one that sticks in my mind is from Goldeneye 007, a first-person shooter based on a James Bond film - in the speed run, the gamer used a grenade launcher to create small explosions just behind him, the force of the blast propelling him forward much faster than Bond could run on his own. These types of examples led me to suspect that gaming chairs would have evolved over time through market pressure to become the most comfortable possible version of the product. Comfortable chairs, I figured, would be preferred by the top performers, which would then influence the novices to adopt the same products, eventually giving the top chair a significant portion of the market share. The subtle lesson from the speed running story is playing out - once a player starts using the grenade launcher to run faster, everyone must do it; the most competitive fields are defined by the non-negotiable tactics used by all its competitors, and these can include equipment if such a thing makes a difference in the end.
This doesn't automatically rule out the possibility of the same mechanism driving the market for office chairs, but from my experience I can guess that offices do not buy chairs based on performance criteria (if I had to guess the criteria, I would go with some combination of design, durability, and price). I'm sure about this partly because I know that many of my colleagues have struggled with office chairs, turning to alternatives such as medicine balls, standing desks, or expensive seats purchased on their own dime in search of a way to get through a day of office work. I have personally experienced a variety of aches and pains that I have blamed on the office chair, which prompted me years ago to build my own standing desk out of recycled cardboard boxes. If offices have been buying chairs for comfort, my personal experience is a highly unlikely outlier. I think this makes sense because from the perspective of a single organization the comfortable chair is a preferred but not required product, and this will remain the case until employees start seeking out firms based on the quality of office equipment. Otherwise, the bottom line is the bottom line - there is simply no need to take on additional costs unless those can be linked to improved productivity.
If I take all of this into account while considering that my goal is to buy a comfortable chair, then the conclusion is obvious - the best office chair for me should be a gaming chair because such chairs were designed (and redesigned) in line with my goals. But is it true? The conclusion certainly has the ring of a classic TOA-ism so I revved up the search engine to see if there was an existing consensus. I came across a few interesting articles, but for the most part they compared the merits of one with the other before helpfully throwing their hands into the air - hey, the chair is up to you! As far as I can tell, there is nothing out there at the moment which offers a definitive statement regarding the better option. This was a little surprising to me at first, but the more I thought about it the more I understood the situation - although I was on the right track, it must be that a comfortable gaming chair doesn't result in enough of a competitive edge to drive the market. Gamers have instead opted for design rather than performance features, a trend which will only strengthen as streaming platforms like Twitch reinforce the importance of looking good on-screen - the chair is a critical part of the presentation.
I suppose the only thing I've actually learned from this exercise is the problem of running with an assumption. Ultimately, it doesn't matter that I can talk about my logic until the sun goes down because the initial assumption - a comfortable chair leads to better gaming performance - wasn't relevant to how gamers made decisions. This is the nature of assumptions, and perhaps those who succeed know something more about them than the rest of us - when to ignore them, when to use them, and when to switch. Bezos, after all, saved a lot of money because he ignored a certain assumption about what a desk should look like, but as the company grew it started to use regular desks. And those speed runners know that the grenade launcher trick works up to a point - too much enthusiasm and Bond's health bar will run out. The chair question, I suppose, requires a similar answer, and maybe I'm sitting on it - a year and a half of working without a chair hasn't been a problem at all, and some of those aches and pains I once associated with the office chair have gone away. The best chair might be the office chair or the gaming chair, but as the article said it's really up to me; the best chair might be no chair at all.
