Boredom, sport, and games

ABSTRACT

The philosophical literature on sport and games has had little to say about boredom beyond presuming that sports and games can be important ways of overcoming or preventing it. But boredom is an interesting and often misunderstood phenomenon with overlooked implications in this context. Boredom has significant human value and motivates play in ways that contribute to well-being and culture, often through encouraging engaged agency and exploration of novelty. Understanding boredom can also help to clarify problems and tendencies in sports and games that qualify them as havens from boredom.

KEYWORDS:

• Boredom
• diversity
• games
• novelty
• play
• sport
• variation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. We apologise for these errors.

Notes

1. Caillois quotes Paul Valéry’s definition of play which is left untranslated in the English version of Caillois’ classic Man, Play and Games. I have translated it for ease of reading. The untranslated quotation is ‘l’ennui peut délier ce que l’entrain avait lié’.

2. Thanks to Paul Gaffney for prompting me to clarify the aesthetic dimensions of responses to boredom and their relation to novelty and to consider that the current discussion suggests an ongoing tension between the development of sport and competitive success on the one hand and aesthetic aspects of sports on the other. This latter topic, which also touches also on issues of boredom in sport, deserves separate attention.

3. For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am indebted to Ian Dunkle, Paul Gaffney, Ted Palys, Christopher Yorke, a reviewer for this journal, and to audiences in 2023 at the International Association of the Philosophy of Sport Annual Meeting in Split, Croatia, and to the British Philosophy of Sport Seminar Series.