My most prized gaming possession?

This was an unexpectedly tough question! I was thinking about all the things that mattered to me the most and I really couldn’t think of anything that I really prized above all other things.

I am proud of the computer that I had built, a little powerhouse of a computer squeezed into a tiny chassis… but I’ve built many other computers before! I am really stoked about my toys (Nvidia Shield Tablet and Nintendo Switch) which allow me to game whilst travelling on all the various forms of transport that I find myself taking whilst working, but then I’m not hugely attached to any of them, as I will happily ditch them for the newer model of shiny!

I have a decently powerful laptop which allows me to do my gaming from hotels and places with a power supply. Again, it is something that I wouldn’t say is my most prized possession, as I want to move back to a proper gaming laptop again. This one that I have is decent, but it is geared more towards productively rather than gaming… and with the release of the Max-Q Nvidia cards, the dream of gaming laptops that don’t weigh a ton is on the cards again!

Likewise, I don’t really have any attachment to any particular digital gaming possession. I tend to play single player games these days rather than multiplayer games, and so there really isn’t anything that is good for collecting. That said, I really do enjoy my Steam library of games, and the Humble Bundle subscription which keeps dumping games into my library to increase my backlog of shame…

I GOT IT!

It took me a while… but I remembered what it is about gaming that attracts me to it. The idea of just immersing yourself in a fictional world and being able to forget about the real world for a little bit. Just like reading or a movie, you are able to just zone out and just be IN THE GAME!

With that realisation, I knew instantly what my most prized gaming possession was! It is my BOSE QC-35 wireless headphones with active noise cancellation. When I’m travelling (or when I’m at home), I throw these on, turn on the noise cancellation and fire up whatever game I’m playing on whatever platform that I currently have (For the Switch, I have a Bluetooth transmitter so I can keep the wireless experience!)… and I’m there! Isolated in my own sound space, with all of the annoying reality fading away to a distant whisper!

People often talk about the screen and the visuals as the thing that make or break the immersiveness of a game experience, but for me (maybe because I’m a musician) the thing that breaks the immersion is the fact that real world sounds intrude or override the in game sounds. That for me, is the most immersion breaking thing.

The idea that you can fade away the real world, and just exist in the in game sound world is something that massively enhances any gaming experience. So, that is why I choose my QC-35 Wireless Noise Cancellation Headphones to be my absolutely most prized gaming possession!