Learning Module 1

Definition of Sport, games, and athletics

Intended Learning Outcomes:

 Understand and inculcate the definition of sports, games, and athletics.
 Recognize the difference of sports, games, and athletics.
 Administer sports, games, and athletics with their uses.

What is Sports?

Sport in childhood. Association football, shown above, is a team sport which also provides opportunities to
nurture physical fitness and social interaction skills.

Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to
use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to
participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, through casual
or organized participation, improve one's physical health. Hundreds of sports exist, from
those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous
participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing,
many contestants may compete, simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner; in
others, the contest (a match) is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other.
Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner; others provide tie-
breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be
arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual
champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases
by playoffs.
Sport is generally recognised as system of activities based in physical athleticism or
physical dexterity, with major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only
sports meeting this definition. Other organisations, such as the Council of Europe,
preclude activities without a physical element from classification as sports. However, a
number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The
International Olympic Committee (through ARISF) recognises
both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and SportAccord, the international sports
federation association, recognises five non-physical sports: bridge,
chess, draughts (checkers), Go and xiangqi, and limits the number of mind games which
can be admitted as sports.

Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair
competition, and allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be determined
by physical events such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. It can also be determined
by judges who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or
subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression.
Records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information
may be widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a major source of
entertainment for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport
venues, and reaching wider audiences through broadcasting. Sport betting is in some
cases severely regulated, and in some cases is central to the sport.
According to A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up
to $620 billion as of 2013. The world's most accessible and practised sport is running,
while association football is the most popular spectator sport.
 The International Olympic Committee recognises some board games as sports including chess

The precise definition of what separates a sport from other leisure activities varies
between sources. The closest to an international agreement on a definition is provided
by SportAccord, which is the association for all the largest international sports federations
(including association football, athletics, cycling, tennis, equestrian sports, and more),
and is therefore the de facto representative of international sport.
SportAccord uses the following criteria, determining that a sport should:

 have an element of competition

 be in no way harmful to any living creature
 not rely on equipment provided by a single supplier (excluding proprietary games
such as arena football)
 not rely on any "luck" element specifically designed into the sport.
They also recognise that sport can be primarily physical (such as rugby or athletics),
primarily mind (such as chess or Go), predominantly motorised (such as Formula
1 or powerboating), primarily co-ordination (such as billiard sports), or primarily animal-
supported (such as equestrian sport).

Show jumping, an equestrian sport

 The inclusion of mind sports within sport definitions has not been universally
accepted, leading to legal challenges from governing bodies in regards to being denied
funding available to sports. Whilst SportAccord recognises a small number of mind sports,
it is not open to admitting any further mind sports.
There has been an increase in the application of the term "sport" to a wider set of
non-physical challenges such as video games, also called esports (from "electronic
sports"), especially due to the large scale of participation and organised competition, but
these are not widely recognised by mainstream sports organisations. According to Council
of Europe, European Sports Charter, article 2.i, "'Sport' means all forms of physical
activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving
physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in
competition at all levels."

What is Games?

Ancient Egyptian gaming board inscribed for Amenhotep III with separate sliding drawer, from 1390–
1353 BC, made of glazed faience, dimensions: 5.5 × 7.7 × 21 cm, in the Brooklyn Museum (New York City)
A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment or fun,
and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is
usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of
aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many
games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports
or games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such
as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games).
Games are sometimes played purely for enjoyment, sometimes for 0. They can be
played alone, in teams, or online; by amateurs or by professionals. The players may have
an audience of non-players, such as when people are entertained by watching a chess
championship. On the other hand, players in a game may constitute their own audience
as they take their turn to play. Often, part of the entertainment for children playing a
game is deciding who part of their audience is and who is a player.
 Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games
generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help
develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform
an educational, simulational, or psychological role.
Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and
present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest
known games.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Children's Games, 1560, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the
definition of the word game. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that
the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define
what games are. From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to
a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might
call family resemblances. As the following game definitions show, this conclusion was not
a final one and today many philosophers, like Thomas Hurka, think that Wittgenstein was
wrong and that Bernard Suits' definition is a good answer to the problem.
Roger Caillois

Gaming table, circa 1735, wood and ivory marquetry, overall: 78.7 x 94 x 54.6 cm, Cleveland Museum of
Art (Cleveland, Ohio, US)
 French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Les jeux et les hommes (Games and
Men), defined a game as an activity that must have the following characteristics:

 fun: the activity is chosen for its light-hearted character

 separate: it is circumscribed in time and place
 uncertain: the outcome of the activity is unforeseeable
 non-productive: participation does not accomplish anything useful
 governed by rules: the activity has rules that are different from everyday life
 fictitious: it is accompanied by the awareness of a different reality

Chris Crawford

The Card Players, an 1895 painting by Paul Cézanne depicting a card game, in Courtauld Institute of
Art (London)

Game designer Chris Crawford defined the term in the context of computers. using a
series of dichotomies:

1. Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty, and entertainment if made
for money.
2. A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are
cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.
3. If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his
definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and
(b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is
a challenge.
4. If a challenge has no "active agent against whom you compete", it is a puzzle; if
there is one, it is a conflict. (Crawford admits that this is a subjective test. Video
 games with noticeably algorithmic artificial intelligence can be played as puzzles;
these include the patterns used to evade ghosts in Pac-Man.)
5. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to
interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. (Competitions
include racing and figure skating.) However, if attacks are allowed, then the
conflict qualifies as a game.
Crawford's definition may thus be rendered as: an interactive, goal-oriented activity
made for money, with active agents to play against, in which players (including active
agents) can interfere with each other.
Other definitions, however, as well as history, show that entertainment and games
are not necessarily undertaken for monetary gain.
Other definitions

 "A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules,
that results in a quantifiable outcome." (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman)
 "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order
to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal." (Greg
Costikyan) According to this definition, some "games" that do not involve choices,
such as Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, and War are not technically games any
more than a slot machine is.
 "A game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to
achieve their objectives in some limiting context." (Clark C. Abt)
 "At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary
control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a
procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome." (Elliot
Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith)
 "A game is a form of play with goals and structure." (Kevin J. Maroney)
 "to play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state
of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted
by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules,
and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such
activity." (Bernard Suits)
 "When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all
games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary
participation." (Jane McGonigal)

What is athletics?

Athletics is a term encompassing the

human competitive sports and games requiring physical skill, and the systems of training
that prepare athletes for competition performance. Athletic sports or contests are
competitions which are primarily based on human physical competition, demanding the
qualities of stamina, fitness, and skill. Athletic sports form the bulk of popular sporting
activities, with other major forms including motorsports, precision sports, extreme sports
and animal sports.
Athletic contests, as one of the earliest types of sport, are prehistoric and
comprised a significant part of the Ancient Olympic Games, along with equestrian events.
The word "athletic" is derived from the Ancient Greek: (athlos) meaning "contest."
Athletic sports became organized in the late 19th century with the formation of
organizations such as the Amateur Athletic Union in the United States and the Union des
Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques in France. The Intercollegiate Athletic
Association of the United States (later the National Collegiate Athletic Association) was
established in 1906 to oversee athletic sports at college-level in the United States, known
as college athletics.
Athletics has gained significant importance at educational institutions; talented
athletes may gain entry into higher education through athletic scholarships and represent
their institutions in athletic conferences. Since the Industrial Revolution, people in the
developed world have adopted an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. As a result, athletics
now plays a significant part in providing routine physical exercise. Athletic
clubs worldwide offer athletic training facilities for multitudes of sports and games.

Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport#Definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game#Definitions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_(physical_culture)#:~:text=Athletics%20is%20a
%20term%20encompassing,prepare%20athletes%20for%20competition%20performan
ce.

Activity: 1.1
1. Write a sentence about your experience during childhood playing different kind of
games.
2. In your own words, what is sports?