Otium and Walking Simulators

There are no sustained attempts to make the term productive for advancing our understanding of the experiences that videogames afford their players yet, but otium certainly is "a contested concept" (Fludernik and Nandi 2014, 4) with a conceptual history that spans from antiquity to the present and that the following can hence only hint at (Eickhoff 2021; Kirchner 2018; and the contributions in Fludernik and Jrgasch 2021 provide more detailed semantic reconstructions).While otium should thus not be directly equated with either the English leisure or the German Mue, this extended abstract will follow Fludernik (2020; 2021) in foregrounding the similarities between those terms rather than those aspects of otium that refer to, say, the absence of (military) threats or (civil) unrest (Eickhoff 2021, 37-55).As a (positively connotated) counter-term to the (negatively connotated) negotium (broadly meaning "business"), otium was used in ancient Rome to "privilege[ ] aristocratic relaxation from civic duties or war over the peasant's, artisan's or slave's rest from toil" (Fludernik and Nandi 2014, 4), which at least partially corresponds to some of the possible distinctions between free time and leisure in English, or between Freizeit and Mue in German.