Microphones are the new gaming status symbol

Nobody needed a gaming mic in the late '90s. Hell, webcams barely even existed yet—if you were attending QuakeCon and wanted to inspire a roiling envy among your fellow PC elitists, your best bet was a garish, chromed-out case. You know what I'm talking about: the crystalline chassis, the glittering water cooling kits, the monolithic fans that sounded like a spaceship taking off. This was the threshold that every up-and-coming geek was expected to aspire to. No peripherals, no bells and whistles, just a big machine and a chunky monitor, pumping out Counter-Strike headshots all night long. You could take that PC to your local LAN party and show everyone who's boss. 

In this wonderful era, the only people who owned computer microphones used them for their day jobs.

Decades have turned over since then. Today if you scroll through the vainglorious posts on r/Battlestations, you will notice a new omnipresent trend: massive, studio-ready microphones perched on everyone's desks, as if the owners are about to either record a podcast or play 10 hours of Apex Legends for a live audience. Mics are everywhere. They are now a stylistic orthodoxy, like wearing a pocket square to a wedding.

There have certainly been other innovations to the gamer aesthetic: Few people pack a 30-inch CRT screen these days, and we don't purchase graphics cards emblazoned with horrifying low-res aliens. But the biggest sea change in the community is that niggling desire to broadcast your voice with the sonorous depth of a millionaire Twitch streamer, even if it's to an audience of three on Discord.

Microphones have morphed from a fringe boutique curiosity to an out-an-out necessity. Our battlestations look sad and malnourished without them.

“A great audio set-up will definitely strike jealousy in someone,” says Andrew, a 15-year old Floridian who showed off his rig in a choice r/Battlestations post earlier this month. Take a look, and you'll find a scarlet PC chassis, a starchy computer chair, and yes, a dangling, mesh-tipped microphone. “It's the same when I see someone with a nice keyboard or whatever. Everything you have will make someone jealous.”

As a zoomer, Andrew is at the forefront of the generational turnover within the PC contingency. He wanted a microphone superior to the chintzy plastic headsets that remained the standard among matchmaking queues throughout the 2000s and 2010s. But as gamers became celebrities in the latter half of the decade—as the stereotype shifted from basement-dwelling grognard towards a Kool Aid-dyed teen in an LA mansion—so too did the men and women in their wake.

There is truly nothing wrong with my headset. My friends can hear me just fine, and I rarely need to record professional audio. But after internalizing the Twitch norms and seeing all the fancy HyperX mics trickle across the timeline, I too have started to feel a primordial gamer inadequacy that brings me back to my teenage years. If you want to know how vulnerable you are to the whims of consumer movements—even at the supposedly solid age of 31—spend a day staring at PC furnishments until your own desk appears naked and meager without an amplifier. 

“I think that all the kids want a 'complete' streaming setup like they see their favorite streamers online have. So whether or not they use it for streaming or just casually, it’s become a part of a complete setup,” says another poster on r/Battlestations, who opted for a $99 Blue Yeti. “I think it has everything to do with wanting to be like the streamers they look up to.”