After a year of working at home during a pandemic, the PS5 offers a welcome respite from sitting at a desk.
What do you think about when you look at your computer desk? Until the pandemic, I thought of it as a fun space – somewhere I sit to enjoy the vast riches of my Steam library with a mouse and keyboard, and play Sea of Thieves every Thursday with friends. At whatever point in the pandemic this is, though, it’s been my office for over a year. Sitting at my PC now makes me think about work and nothing else. I definitely don’t discount my luck that I’ve been able to keep working throughout the last 14 months. But I do think the lack of boundaries between work and home in terms of living space has warped my relationship with PC gaming. I’m very used to working in an office – I know it’s not for everyone, but having somewhere to go every day is definitely good for me. Plus, the employees of the sandwich shops near my office know me on a first-name basis. There was a point last year where I was playing PC games with friends on 4 or 5 nights a week, alongside working at my desk full-time. I eventually burned out on this big time, and scaled back my social gaming period on PC to one night a week, mostly so I could go and sit in a different part of my flat during the evenings. Fundamentally, my gaming PC is less a part of my spare time than it’s ever been. The PS5 arrived at exactly the right time: just as I was truly sick and tired of looking at my desktop for 10-16 hours a day. As my desire to jump on at 10pm for a few rounds Apex Legends waned, this console picked up the slack. I started playing PS4 games I’d missed like Ghost of Tsushima and Days Gone just to see how the unexpected frame rate update benefitted each one. Right now, the PS5 is at the center of my gaming life in a way that the PS4 never was, and I attribute that to the console feeling more like an actual generational leap than its predecessor ever did. The PS5 menu music is lovely. Everything from this choice of background theme to the UI is surely designed to make the console feel more premium than the PS4 did. This might sound like I’m rubbing it in if you’ve been trying and failing to find PS5 stock while scalpers hoover console supplies up, but it is genuinely nice to have the console switched on while you’re making a drink.
