Can gaming chairs be used as office chairs?

Or are they just built for fragging.

Is it okay to use a gaming chair as an office chair for your daily working routine on an ongoing basis? The short answer to this is ‘probably not’, but the slightly longer and more complex answer is that it depends on your situation and the exact gaming chair in question.

As a general rule of thumb, gaming chairs aren’t designed with sound ergonomics first and foremost in mind. They may be designed to be comfortable – or perhaps to look comfortable, more to the point, perhaps overdoing the padding, for example.

We’ve also seen models with a pronounced lumbar support which looks like it might support your back – or at least that the chair designers thought about this aspect of the seat – but it’s actually over-the-top, which is likely to be worse for your back than just a straight backrest.

Gaming chairs are also often designed to be affordable, and to look good – usually like racing car seats – neither of which elements lend themselves well in terms of the search for a good quality chair that you can sit in all day while you work. Gaming chairs are less likely to come with any ergonomic adjustments either, aside from raising (or lowering) the height of the seat.

Are there exceptions to the rule? This is where the longer answer comes in, because there are pricier and higher-end gaming chairs which do take their ergonomic design seriously. For example, the Edge GX1 is highlighted as an excellent ergonomic option in our best gaming chair roundup, or you might want to check out the Herman Miller Embody Gaming Chair, an adaptation of a high-quality ergonomic office chair.

Models like these can make fine choices, although note that they are the exceptions, generally speaking. Even a mid-range gaming chair might be okay for, say, bouts of part-time working, but the truth – at least in our experience – is that your average gaming chair isn’t a good choice for the 9-to-5 grind.