Are Electronic Leisure Applications “Virtual Recreation” or “Digital Recreation”?

Abstract

In the study, it is aimed to clarify whether electronic leisure applications, which have become a form of leisure time in today’s world, should be handled within the context of virtual recreation or digital recreation. The necessary data have been obtained by scanning secondary sources. The scans have been made within the framework of the concepts of “leisure”, “recreation”, “electronic leisure”, “virtual”, “digital”, “virtual recreation” and “digital recreation”. Accordingly, primarily virtual and digital concepts have been examined semantically, how they add a meaning to the phenomenon of recreation has been explained, and then it has been discussed which concept would be the best choice for this type of recreation. As a result of the study, it has been found that the concepts of “dijital” and “virtual” contain different meanings and add different meanings to the phenomenon of recreation. Among the findings, it is also stated that the concepts of “virtual” overlaps with the structure of the recreation phenomenon. Based on this point, the study suggests that it would be more appropriate to call the recreation type that includes electronic leisure applications as virtual recreation.