Our GIAM colleagues Vicente Navarro Adelantado and Miguel Pic Aguilar have presented their new book La paradoja de jugar en tríada. El juego motor en tríada (The Paradox of Playing in a Triad. The Triad Motor Game).
A triad is a collective arrangement with distinctive consequences when it takes the form of a motor game. Triads bring ambivalent social relationships into play that tend towards a balance of forces, and co-alliance has strategic consequences. The authors catalogue 13 types of motor triads, either fully connected or with a connection missing between two of the three nodes. When the teams interact, shifts in the balance of forces produce paradoxical situations, even though some types of triad are less favoured in their connections and flows. The book uses competitive team chasing games as its model. Because these games have rules, the situations that arise can be anticipated.
The book provides a theoretical and methodological analysis of triads based on motor praxeology and supported by graph theory. It examines how social relationships are communicated and how utility guides decisions according to strategic preferences, to understand how different types of motor triad behave and how playable they are. The analysis works at two levels: the communication network and its flows, and the role, through communication indicators such as sending and receiving, within-group and between-group interactions, and positive and negative valences. Motor triads have three properties that can govern and disrupt the strategy used to approach the game: circulation, transitivity and interactivity. The triads in the catalogue are therefore playable under certain conditions, for example when the rules are open enough to allow triadic relationships or when the goal is adapted to a team’s initial strength in terms of sending and receiving. The authors compare four triadic games from the catalogue through motor communication to measure their differences and show their viability. Finally, they propose 20 triadic motor games to put the book’s general approach into practice. Taken together, the work shows that motor triads behave in distinctive and sometimes complex ways, especially compared with two-sided opposition games, from which they depart by creating a triadic setting of their own.
PDF e-book ISBN: 978-84-09-13525-7.