Cautions and Considerations on Gaming for Leisure
Video games are as much praised for being a medium to tell stories and develop critical thinking skills, as they are pointed to as the culprit for reduced sleep, worsened behavior and laziness. But, in order to truly assess video games as a leisurely activity, we must first clarify the nature of leisure.
Leisure, as opposed to work, refers to activities performed for a person’s own sake and out of choice, rather than out of necessity. With this in mind, leisure includes activities ranging from video games to reading, prayer, sports and more.
Yet, we at once notice that these activities are unequal. For example, prayer is a far higher form of leisure to many video games, and even reading can be a high and low form depending on the books we read.
To further understand this hierarchy of leisure, we can examine the theory of Jay B. Nash, an American educator who posited that leisure can be codified based on the level of participation within a given leisurely activity.
Nash, in his book “Philosophy of Recreation and Leisure,” says that the highest forms of leisure entail creative participation, where a person exercises their abilities and skills to create something, be it art, a story, a garden and more. Below these are activities which require active participation, be it mental, physical or spiritual.
Following these are forms of leisure that have some form of emotional participation, where a person experiences an emotional reaction from their engagement with the activity, even if they aren’t active in that engagement. Lastly, there are activities which Nash terms “spectatoris” level leisure, where an activity requires no engagement and is instead meant to pass time and distract from the feeling of boredom.
With this in mind, video games fall quite highly on this hierarchy, as they encourage players to actively engage in the setting, rules and story in which a game is set. However, we must also pay heed to the very nature of this engagement.
While a gamer might be active in his enjoyment of Grand Theft Auto V, he is actively engaging in a game which encourages a player to simulate criminal and immoral acts, such as heists or attacking law enforcement officers. Other games, like Minecraft, encourage players to build and survive in the game’s given setting without requiring immoral acts, while games like Doom and Dark Souls have the characters fight monsters or demons with the goal of being a hero.
The examples I mentioned are far more complex in their gameplay than there is time to relate, but they point to the importance of the nature of our engagement. We need to assess whether our games encourage us to simulate vice or virtue and how they address our choices.
In addition, we must consider how video games put us in communion with others. Man is a social animal, and our interdependence on our fellow men means that we ought to seek community both in work and rest. How do our games draw us towards other people, and what kind of communal behavior do they foster?
Lastly, it must be said that video games, even though they require active engagement or encourage virtue and heroism, are inherently linked to the virtual world. We ought to strive to build community, foster virtue and order our lives in the real world, more so than the virtual world, where, fundamentally, we interact with ones and zeroes on a screen, as opposed to God’s creation.