Leisure

Approaches to defining and operationalizing leisure as a subject of study by sociologists and anthropologists and ethnographers have taken three paths. Leisure may be envisioned as a time, as an activity, or as a cognitive/affective state.

Much of the literature about leisure and the messages in the media and daily conversation are replete with references in which leisure is equated with “free time.” But there is a difficulty with this approach. Are the unemployed leisurely? The bed-ridden? The incarcerated? The notion of leisure as free time took hold among scholars during the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s with the rise of the “working class” and became a rallying point for unionization movements. But the simplistic notion of leisure as time free from obligations fell out of favor.

A new generation of empirical scholars in the early 20th Century sought to define leisure as a collective of specific activities. Thus, reading was leisure, but studying was not. Sports were leisure; exercise was not. The problem with this approach was that many activities could be both. For instance, eating can be both an obligatory necessity and a pleasurable pursuit (think of all the gourmet restaurants). So, simply listing some activities as leisure and some as not is a questionable approach.

Sebastian de Grazia, in his influential exploration [1962], offered the belief that leisure is a “state of being.” While that cognitive state is countered by the immediate and transitory nature of the activity, the meanings generated therein affect us deeply. Leisure is more than just a present reality. It has future-oriented components as well as past associations as well as cultural forms and environments. Leisure, then, is defined more by personal orientations and meaningfulness than by time or place, by activity or even by outcome.

This now popular interpretation of leisure has led to a number of insights that are relevant for any study of videogaming as entertainment (as opposed to “serious games”). Among the most influential is the concept of “flow” first offered by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1970. He proposed that when the challenge of an activity and the skill of the individual were in balance, the person entered what he termed a “state of flow.” In effect, all awareness of the passage of time or physical conditions are subsumed by the chosen leisure activity. Thus, the phenomenon among gamers of suddenly realizing at dawn that one has played that game of Minecraft or Civilization the entire night.

Given the broad array of activities and the money invested in leisure pursuits in developed nations, the study of leisure is a growing, significant pursuit across a number of academic disciplines, to the point where graduate degrees are offered in “Leisure Studies” at a number of universities.