Immersive Media and User Experience

Vol. 2 (2026)
Articles

Coupling Specialization with Affordance: A Developmental Framework for the Deepening of Digital Leisure Engagement

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  • Ke Xiaobo Bob,
  • Christian Wagner
Ke Xiaobo Bob
The Education University of Hong Kong, China
Christian Wagner
The Education University of Hong Kong, China

Published 2026-08-19

Keywords

  • Digital leisure engagement,
  • Leisure specialization,
  • IT affordance,
  • Affordance-Actualized Specialization (AAS) framework,
  • Amateur esports
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Coupling Specialization with Affordance: A Developmental Framework for the Deepening of Digital Leisure Engagement. (2026). Immersive Media and User Experience, 2, 63-70. https://doi.org/10.65638/2978-8811.2026.2.06

Abstract

Digital leisure engagement (defined as the sustained, discretionary involvement of users with IT enabled leisure activities such as competitive gaming, quantified fitness, hobbyist communities, and creator economies) has become a defining behavioral phenomenon of the platform era. It is conventionally theorized as a matter of intensity, an approach that captures variance in adoption and use but underexplains the IT-enabled qualitative deepening through which recreational users become committed, identity-defining, and increasingly institutionalized participants. To bridge this gap, this article develops the Affordance-Actualized Specialization (AAS) framework, which specifies the mechanisms through which such deepening occurs across digital leisure domains. Drawing on conceptual synthesis, the framework integrates leisure specialization theory with IT affordance theory through the mediating mechanism of affordance actualization. Three dimensions of leisure specialization (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and affective) are coupled to four functionally distinct classes of IT affordance (i.e., performative, relational, visibility, and institutional) through goal-directed enactment that is reinforced by feedback loops. Six propositions are derived and illustrated through a focal case of amateur esports. The framework predicts that digital leisure engagement deepens along two divergent developmental trajectories: (1) staying with the activity versus (2) stepping forward into institutionalized participation, which are determined not by aggregate engagement intensity but by which affordance classes that participants preferentially actualize and in what sequence. Moreover, asymmetric actualization produces structurally fragile engagement carrying elevated risk of adverse downstream outcomes. The study contributes to immersive media and user experience research by offering a mechanism-level, cross-domain account of digital leisure engagement deepening and by reconceptualizing immersion as the layered actualization of affordances rather than as a perceptual property of digital media.

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