Advanced Modelling of Ludomotor Games

Abstract

Pierre Parlebas is a French professor in sport sociology, mathematician, psychologist, but above everything, a physical education (PE) teacher. He pursues the study of society from the structures of the games. He proposes the Motor Praxiology in order to study the motor action, which is oriented by a logic of a specific situation. As a good scientist he started looking for objective measurable variables, elements that could lead to the understanding of the e↵ects of the internal logic of the situations. Parlebas understands the PE as the education of the motor conduct which is created by a motor action and its meaning. According to him, the situations of the sporting games orient the motor conduct of the players, and consequently, their motor action. The curiosity as a PE teacher to understand sporting games, due to their power to orientate the motor conducts, pushed him to build mathematical models of ludomotor games, that is, models of the objective structures of the internal logic of games which took the name of universals. A model is a simplified representation of a given reality which is generally designed to study, explain or predict phenomena. Universals were models proposed by Pierre Parlebas, maybe, the specific knowledge that PE teachers need in order to carry out their job: educate the motor conduct. As a future PE teacher,I also feel the same curiosity as Parlebas did. If I want to be a good PE teacher, should not I understand the logic of the situations of the games?. Knowing that the motor action represents the common denominator of all the physical practises and confers its own identity to the PE, I consider necessary to know all the possibilities, e↵ects and functioning of the sporting games. In this project we are going to continue with the modelling activity suggested by Parlebas but using modern computational resources, in other words, we are going to make advanced modelling of the ludomotor games. For that, we are going to analyse a game called 4 corners, a game easy to model and already modelled by Parlebas in 1973. Our proposal covers two main elements: 1) the study of the mathematical analysis of the 4 corners game and its integration. 2) a new approach for the observation and utilization of computational tools to do that analysis.