Why Online Game Players Should Clean Their Gaming Room Weekly

My gaming room is about nine square metres. It contains a desk, a PC that runs warm, two monitors, a console, a chair, a small sofa, a shelf of games, and, for reasons I cannot fully defend, a cream carpet. For three years I cleaned it whenever it became obviously dirty, which in practice meant every two or three months. Then I tried cleaning it weekly for a whole season, partly as an experiment for this blog. The difference surprised me, and not only in how the room looked.

Gaming rooms get dirtier than most rooms in a home, for reasons I explain below. A weekly clean sounds like a chore, but done properly it takes about 25 minutes and saves far more time than it costs. Here is the case for it, and the routine I settled on.

Why gaming rooms get dirty so fast

A room where someone games for several hours a day faces a particular combination of problems that a guest bedroom or dining room never sees.

• Long hours of occupation. Skin flakes, hair and clothing fibres accumulate wherever people sit for a long time.
• Food and drink. Snacks and drinks near the desk mean crumbs, splashes and the occasional serious spill.
• Warm electronics. PCs and consoles pull air through their vents, collecting dust inside and blowing warm air that keeps dust circulating.
• Closed doors and windows. Many gamers keep the room dark and closed for screen glare and noise, which means poor ventilation.
• Constant chair movement. Castors grind dirt into the carpet in a concentrated area.

Put together, a gaming room can collect in one week what a lightly used room collects in a month. Our stains writer goes into the dust side of this in why gaming rooms collect more dust than other rooms.

What I noticed after a season of weekly cleaning

I kept rough notes over twelve weeks. Nothing scientific, but the changes were clear enough.

The carpet looked better and stayed better

Grit was the main enemy. When I vacuumed every two or three months, a layer of grit built up in the chair area and the pile started to look flattened and grey. Weekly vacuuming removed the grit before castors could grind it in. By the end of the season, the chair area looked noticeably closer to the rest of the carpet.

Stains stopped becoming permanent

Weekly cleaning meant I spotted small marks within days, not months. A drop of cola found after three days came out easily. Similar drops found after two months had turned into dark sticky patches that took several attempts.

My PC ran cooler

This was the surprise. With less dust in the room, the PC's intake filters clogged more slowly. I did not measure it carefully, but the fans were noticeably quieter during long sessions by the second month.

The room felt better to be in

Hard to measure, easy to notice. Less stale air, no crumbs under bare feet, less mild guilt every time I sat down.

The 25 minute weekly routine

This is the routine I use now, every Sunday morning before I play anything. The order matters: top to bottom, so dust falls onto surfaces you have not cleaned yet.

Once a month I add two extra jobs: cleaning the PC's dust filters and vacuuming the sofa cushions. Once a season, I deep clean the carpet in the chair area.

The seasonal deep clean is simple. I move the desk chair and mat out, vacuum the area very slowly in two directions, treat any marks, then use a small handheld spot cleaner over the roughly one metre circle where the chair sits. With the window open and a fan running, it dries in about four hours. The whole job takes under an hour, and it is the reason the chair area no longer looks like a different carpet from the rest of the room.

One tip from Declan, our lead writer, that I ignored for too long: vacuum the castors, not just the carpet. Fluff and hair wrapped round the wheels get dragged across the pile every time you roll. Pulling it out with tweezers every month made the biggest difference to the grey ring under my chair.

Common objections, and my answers

"Weekly is too much, monthly is fine"

For a spare room, I agree. For a room used several hours a day with food in it, monthly cleaning lets grit and stains settle in. The weekly version is shorter than the monthly one, because there is less to deal with each time. My old two-monthly clean took over an hour and still left marks behind.

"I do not have time"

Twenty-five minutes is less than one ranked match in many games. If you play several hours a week, it is a small fraction of that time.

"I will just get a robot vacuum"

Robot vacuums help with surface fluff and are worth having if the budget allows. In gaming rooms they tend to get stuck on cables, chair bases and controller wires, and they do not clean under the desk or along the edges well. Use one between weekly cleans, not instead of them.

Making it stick

A routine only works if it happens. A few things helped me keep going.

• Same time every week. Mine is Sunday before my first session. It is now a habit, like brushing teeth.
• Kit in the room. A small caddy under the desk with cloths, a spray bottle and a carpet spot cleaner. No walking to another room.
• Music or a podcast. Obvious, and it works.
• A reward. First game of the week only after the room is done. Childish, effective.

If cleaning still feels like a slog, try playing a cleaning game first. Strangely, it helped me, as I explain in cleaning games that make online game players tidy up. And if you want to keep costs down, our guide to budgeting for home cleaning supplies covers what you actually need.