Cable management is for the tryhards. That’s what I told myself until a few weeks ago when I found myself pulling apart the big tangled seabed with Ethernet cables to vacuum my office.
While wireless connectivity is the norm for movie buffs and even audiophiles these days, gamers have made life difficult for us. We have singled out latency as our enemy. We are therefore still in the process of reassembling our three HDMIs from our three consoles to our televisions, still winding three Ethernet cables from our modems to these three consoles. And, of course, we always plug those three consoles into the wall. After a year of staying home and accumulating play and office supplies, my floor looks like the bottom of Strega Nona’s pasta pot.
There are of course fixes. Look for any video meant to walk gamers through their cable management journey and you’ll find a YouTube thumbnail of a whitened-smile normie holding a drill and several finger traps (these are cable clips) improvement “” projects ”. Personally, I am not about to perform surgery on my desk. And if I have six more hours on my hands, I’m not going to run them face down on my office floor. I’ll spend them playing.
It is possible to lazily manage the cables. Here are some smart but effortless ways for gamers to keep their floors and walls tidy.
The cables you have
It’s not rude, but you wouldn’t have so many cables to deal with if you just bought the right length. If you can’t differentiate your soil from that of your local forest, it’s probably because your cables are too long.
If you have the funds, consider new cables. Measure the path of your cables in a room and add an extra eight inches – better a little too long than too short. Purchasing high quality cables with minimal slack will reduce the likelihood of having to rewire in the future. And since it can be annoying to change cables when they’re hidden behind a wall-mounted cable tray, swing for durable, premium high-speed HDMI you probably want anyway for your Xbox One X or PlayStation 5. Cable quality is important in the long run.
Cable management equipment
What you will need depends on your configuration. If your computer is above your desk, for example, you might want to install a surge protector at the bottom of your desk so that only one cable is plugged into the wall. If your TV is wall mounted and you hate those hanging HDMI cables that come out of your Nintendo Switch, you might want to get some paint to match the color of the cable tray to that of your wall.
