Way back in early September during the Penny Arcade Expo, Kotaku alumnus Adam Barenblat and I met Robert Gifford, a man who thinks gamers of all kinds deserve to have nice gaming furniture. Stuff not to be embarrassed of.

For more on Gifford’s products, check out the Geek Chic website. As you can hear in the video, he hopes to have furniture for video games someday as well.

Boutique furniture designers Because We Can recently built the Penny Arcade team a new conference table. It’s 16 feet long and cost over $US4000. But that’s not why we love it.

We love it because it glows in the dark. Who has a business meeting in the dark? Penny Arcade do now, that’s who. Oh, and if anybody thinks of giving the “simplistic” design any crap, Twisp, Catsby and the Moon aren’t drawn, they’re inlaid wood.

You can read all about the process here, on BWC’s blog, while there’s a video showing off the hot glow in the dark action here.

Twisp & Catsby Conference table for Penny Arcade [Because We Can, via Boing Boing]

Finally a solution for gamers who want to game but just don’t have the upper body strength to support their own arms.

Ikea’s Jesper is a padded bench that you straddle while playing games. The design allows you to rest your arms in front of you as you game, thus mitigating even the slightly physical benefits of long hours of gaming.

Ian Bogost theorises that the Jesper is named after games researcher Jesper Juul. I think it’s named after the guy at Ikea who had the bright idea to turn a Tantra chair into something kids can use.

I Can’t Hold My Arms Up [Ian Bogost]

WebUrbanist has compiled an interesting list of game-themed furniture that includes everything from Pac-Man chairs to fully-enclosed gaming pods.

Some of my favourites among the 19 pieces of extravagance:

The Ovei looks like the perfect solution for the gamer who wants to get away from it all. The pod features 5.1 surround sound, a cooling system, controllable LED lighting, a monitor arm for mounting your display of choice, and the best part, a door that shuts out all outside reality.

Digital Edge’s Gaming Table includes room to house up to three 21-inch LCD monitors, a printer and plenty of flightsticks.

The Novotable is a 32-inch LCD touch screen mounted into a bar cabinet with banks of controllers and buttons. You get to choose between having a built-in Playstation 3 or Xbox 360.

What are your favorites?

19 Gorgeously Geeky Pieces of Gaming Furniture [Web Urbanist]

When this thing arrived, I have to admit I was shocked. The pictures don’t quite convey how industrial the nylon skin really looks — this ain’t the old velour or corduroy style beanbag I remember from the ’80s. It’s also shaped more like a giant pillow than a traditional beanbag, which made it hard to grasp how it would work for anything other than lying down. So at first glance the question was “THAT is meant to be comfortable? No way.”

But it is! For best results, I found sitting it up square on its seam made comfortable seating work like a charm. But by flipping it around in a variety of ways, you could get comfortable for doing different things.Gamewise, I found it comfortable for kicking back and enjoying some general console play. That’s a given. But what was unexpected was that it could be adjusted to work as a very comfortable — and stable — drum stool for World Tour (kind of like how the girl is sitting on the Omni in the picture). I was also able to get more comfortable with the 360 steering wheel on my lap than I could on the couch. It’s also very supportive, and not the kind of comfortable where you end up with a numb ass and a displaced hip 30 minutes in.

In essence, this is a pretty good one-size-fits-all seat for your games room. It does take up a fair amount of space, though, taking up a similar amount of floor space to a two-seater couch — not quite as much, but enough that you wonder how to kick it out of the way when not in use. If you have the space, and the $199 (stick it on a group gift Christmas wishlist!) it’s a good option. I think a lot of people forget about the comfort factor for their game sessions, and this is definitely a beanbag that delivers.

Slipping right under Namco Bandai’s legal radar (until right now, we guess), Italian designer QAYOT has made this Pac-Man-like seat. Covered in a stain resistant coated fabric, the Pouf-Man doesn’t eat pellets like its gaming counterpart but a square cushion. It’s also not yellow. And that’s what people think when they hear Pac-Man: Pellets and yellow. Well, that’s what we always think. Always.

Pouf-Man [QAYOT via technabob via Inspire me, now! via CribCandy via Home Tome]

UK based Pli Design is taking advantage of all those unwanted consoles with its Reee chair, which features 100% recycled PlayStation 2 plastic. Sound familiar? It might, as we wrote about Pli’s PlayStation product last year. Seems Pli is just getting around to “launching” it next week.

If you’re worrying about compromising “environmental credentials”, look no further than the Reee. You’ve never sat this green before.

Recycled PlayStation®2 chair is a UK first [Pli]

NES coffee table FINAL POST!! RAH!!!! [Ultra-Awesome]

Tetrad Shelving [Brave Space Design]

Pixel Couch [thecoolhunter]