A deep understanding of sport competition is essential for games because the success of coaches and players in such events is dependent on many qualitative and latent factors, which are explainable by means of highly problematic and complicated procedures. The difficulty of setting out the ''winning-factors'' in games in orderly fashion has forced researchers to study a game as complex entitites, and in particular as dynamical systems (Bar-Yam, Y. (2000)
In this article I defend my previously published system approach to game playing in sports (Lebed, 2006). Founded on the main argument of mine about insufficiency of performance analysis only for games study, it is based on an inter-disciplinary comprehension of sporting game events from four different angles: the logical-philosophical, the behavioural (performance), the anthropological, and complexity angles. The paper consists of four parts, corresponding to the four angles. The first three parts offer deconstructive and reconstructive analysis. The three provide criticism of McGarry and Frank's arguments against my view of complex dynamical systems in sports. The logical analysis negates my opponents' general view of a match (a process) as a dynamical system. The behaviour analysis refutes their claim about couple oscillator dynamics as a universal dynamically interpreted model of game playing. The anthropological panoramic vision of sporting games leads me to conclude that my opponents' analysis of two exclusively interacting sides in a squash or soccer contest is too narrow and insufficient to explain the broad diversity of games. According to the classification suggested in Lebed (2004), I offer seven possible models that can systematically reflect different groups of games. In the fourth part, the complexity angle is analysed from a constructive point of view. Here I take one of the above seven models and try to outline a ''soccer-like'' game perspective modelling founded on the view of play process as a conflict of two four-level self-regulating complex systems, where each one is additionally involved in its own loop of cybernetic regulation.
The differences between categories of play in English and spiel in German (or jeu in French and so on) are essential because any complex ludic category includes games that are organized and restricted by roles and rules. My choice to deal with Wittgensteinian views of spiel (which is translated by default as ‘play’) is influenced by the fact that his argument in German about the impossibility and futility of a philosophical definition of spiel embodies the quintessence of the problem: the linguistic obstacle that prevents correct interpretation of human play. Methodologically, I make the philosophical question of dependence a linguistic one. The article concludes by defending the position that game is only one of the diverse activities realizing human play, which is a basic existential phenomenon that can be considered philosophically through the category of ‘other being’.
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