You might wonder why the differentiation between office chairs and gaming chairs really matters. After all, an office chair won't eject you from it if you try to play a video game in it, nor will a gaming chair do the same if you're feeling responsible enough to get some work done. But, for some shoppers and many manufacturers, the differentiation still seems important.
To understand why this became the case, you need to know some of the features that defined each category. Unfortunately, this is an increasingly difficult task. Even if delineations between gaming and office started out clear-cut, they've become blurred over the years as each side continually borrowed from the other when a new feature arose that its own customers might find useful. The result is a nebulous situation in which it's harder to tell what really makes a seat a gaming chair versus what makes it an office chair, aside from its accompanying ad copy, of course.
With all that in mind, we're going to dive into the dwindling list of unique characteristics that each side offers, the features you should prioritize when choosing which a seating option, and whether or not any of this even really matters.
What defines an office chair?
This is obviously the far older of the two definitions. People were working in offices centuries before "gaming" was a thing. In their modern incarnations, most office chairs share a handful of characteristics: They're usually on casters, most have one or more forms of adjustment to help them better fit each user, and they're typically padded, though the form this padding takes can vary greatly.
The general