Comment by Tanoc

Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.