Why build your own PC
I had the privilege of being exposed to computers at a time when the word I said the most was “why?”. I have a cool uncle whose attractions (swimming pools, ATVs, Frisbee dogs, industrial lawn mowers) are my cool uncle’s small business and hobby: making personal computers. Every Christmas, Thanksgiving, or non-holiday visit to his house, my cousins and I scramble to get into his basement and admire the electronics.
In effect, it’s more of a morgue: the bones of dead PCs are exposed, so they might be housed in new PCs that are spawning next to them. I don’t think there is a case panel on any PC. My cousins and I would speculate how many megahertz is in the processor. We’ll poke capacitors. We’d be amazed at how the serial cable allowed two people to play the same Quake game together, their CRTs back-to-back. This is a kind of technological destruction for us. If the kids annoyed my uncle by digging in the expensive guts of 386s and Pentium IIs, he’d hide it from us.
Formative game stories like mine are not unique. I think anyone who is passionate about games can point to how they got into it and what that means to them. But I do think that exposure to PC building at a young age can improve our relationship with the games we play.
Seeing the CPU, RAM, hard drives, and cables strewn across the open made me realize that the beige box that makes gaming happen isn’t something fragile, sacred. Those boxes shouldn’t be sealed shut – you’re supposed to put your hands inside for the surgery. Throwing away a piece of technology is a wasteful crime – why do it when you can use its parts to build a PC that can run as a server or a device that your neighbors can use?
I didn’t know it at the time, but exposure to PC manufacturing freed me from the notion that gaming has to do with consumerism about how much I could take home from Best Buy and pile it up to impress my friends. Play has nothing to do with accumulating products: it is a hobby and a craft, an environment in which to express yourself with different tools. Like owning a pet, it’s a craft that comes with responsibility. I had to clean my computer to keep it happy. When my computer isn’t healthy, I really have to listen to its whimpering, in the form of motherboard beeps, to diagnose why it’s not good.
Gamers have long considered their platform to be the best. But no matter how persuasive your forum posts are, I think what really makes sense to differentiate PC gaming from other platforms is its transparency. When your Contra cartridge doesn’t work with your NES, even if your parents are electrical engineers, your only recourse is superstition. When your Xbox 360 inevitably turns red, you’ll have to take it to Narnia on vacation to get it fixed. The console deprives its owner of the opportunity to develop a relationship with the hardware itself.
This relationship takes on new meaning as we age. Buying your own parts encourages you to thoroughly research which graphics card will last the longest, or which monitor specs actually matter — a good habit for dreaded adult milestones like buying a car or a house. Replacing your own parts, doing your own troubleshooting, no matter how frustrating, instills in you the idea that spending time researching and solving problems can be time-consuming at first, but the knowledge and attitude you gain from it is invaluable.
I’ve learned to embrace the headaches that come naturally with homemade technology as an opportunity to get involved in my hobby, and maybe even become a better person in the process. Han Solo was a great pilot, not because he bought the best ship in the universe, but because he knew exactly how the Millennium Falcon was put together and when the engines crackled to kick it to where.
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