Progressão
Progressão is a book, a podcast, and a long-term thinking project focused on football, learning, and skilful human behaviour. Our work approaches football from a complex, holistic, and ecological perspective, where players and all football actors are understood as living beings always in correspondence with their environment.
Progressão
#188 Game intelligence: back to nature
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Welcome to the Progressão podcast.
In Episode 187, we opened the discussion around game intelligence by revisiting the more traditional definitions of the concept — a view where game intelligence is often treated as a separate cognitive component involving perception, anticipation, and decision-making.
This week, we take the discussion further. Or perhaps more accurately, we take it back to nature.
What if game intelligence is not something that sits inside the player as a separate mental component? What if skilful action is better understood through the relationship between the player and the environment?
In this episode, we use examples from nature — plants, box jellyfish, and wolves — to challenge the idea that intelligence must always be brain-based. From there, we move into the ecological view of football, where perception and action are inseparable, and where skill emerges through attunement to meaningful information in the environment.
Drawing especially from two key propositions, we argue that game intelligence is the ability to establish a meaningful connection with the environment, and that skill learning is the process of becoming attuned to ecological information and organising action within an information-rich world.
From Jari Litmanen to affordances, direct perception, and the human–environment system, this episode continues our journey toward understanding football as a living, relational, and deeply ecological phenomenon.
Further reading from the ideas discussed in this episode:
Bielecki, J., Dam Nielsen, S. K., Nachman, G., & Garm, A. (2023). Associative learning in the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora. Current Biology.
Gable, T. D., Homkes, A. T., Johnson-Bice, S. M., Windels, S. K., & Bump, J. K. (2021). Wolves choose ambushing locations to counter and capitalize on the sensory abilities of their prey. Behavioral Ecology, 32(2), 339–348.
Mech, L. D., Smith, D. W., & MacNulty, D. R. (2015). Wolves on the Hunt. University of Chicago Press.
Segundo‐Ortin, M., & Calvo, P. (2022). Consciousness and cognition in plants. WIREs Cognitive Science, 13(2).
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Ruke Stanley on podcast lyrika Jannista ja Juusi Pästolainen. Kotata ihmisella Rukka Stanalla. How we misshydäsa fotolla. We exploramme ykkäinen jo, kompleksita relaksja betässä kummännäjän ja environment ja the näytti kyllä fotkoiluun. Welkom to debata.
SPEAKER_02Welkom to ProKretta podcast. Today continua discussion on game intelligenta ja itsella. As quäkap von näistä viikona episod: it's worth briefly revisiting the more traditional definitions of game intelligence. Traditionall, game intelligence or game understanding or decision making has been understood as a separate kognitive component of performance or action separate from action. As a separate cognitive component that is different than action itself. It usually includes abilities such as perception, anticipation, decision making and tactical decision making for example. And in this view a player first perceives the situation, then processes the poor information mentally and finally selects the more appropriate action for the benefit of themselves and the team. And this way of thinking also links closely to the traditional split between technique and tactics or decision making. Teknique is often seen as the movement or execution component, while tactics and decision making are seen as a thinking component. So in short the traditional definitions treat game intelligence as something that exists inside the player as a kognitiven skill set separate from the movement itself. episodessä we had two statements that were related to the traditional view of skill.
SPEAKER_00So this week we want to go back to nature. And what does that mean? Like said, usually game intelligence is taught as a higher cognitive component: something that happens in the brain, thinking, understanding the game, making decisions, processing information. But drawing from ecological psychology, we would argue that it may be something much more natural than that. So let's open that up. And because we are going back to nature, let's begin with a plant. Take the mellow plant. Researchers in ecological psychology have used plants and animals to challenge the idea that intelligence must be brain-based. A plant turns toward sunlight. But even more interestingly, when the sun sets during the night it begins to orient itself toward where the sun is expected to rise again in a way it anticipates the environment. And of course the plant has no brain. Yet still it behaves in an intelligent way in relation to its environment?
SPEAKER_02A second example comes from the animal world. Take the box jellyfish. Recent research has shown that the pox jellyfish can learn to avoid obstacles. During the intervention it gradually learns to not collide with the object. And here is the fascinating question: how is that possible when the jellyfish has no brain and no sensual nervous system? How can it learn and adapt its behavior? This suggests that intelligent behavior does not necessarily require higher cognition in the way we often imagine it. Plants and the box jellyfish are intelligent at least in the sense that they are able to stay alive and reproduce by using many different forms of skill.
SPEAKER_00And take wolves as example. So wolves hunt as a pack. They are social koordinated and highly adaptive. Sometimes they can even be described as strategic. They kooperate to survive. But perhaps the most interesting part is that they do not always hunt in the same way. So, depending on the environment, they can develop new hunting tactics or strategys.
SPEAKER_02For example, wolves often hunt larger animals as a pack, but in environments where those animals are not available, they adapt. Researchers have observed vows changing their behaviour when hunting beavers. Beavers are animals that are afraid of everything. They very easily go away if they smell something. And it's not easy to hunt a beaver. So instead of chasing kollectively, the wolves begin to hide and stalk. They wait. They go behind the push and from there they ambush. They wait, they ambush, so their behavior changes according to what the environment offers and demands, and we could say that this is intelligent adaptation.
SPEAKER_00And Janit, this begins to sound a lot like what we often call game intelligence. So the wolves are not analysing, processing and deciding in the klass computational sense, yet they behave skillfully in relation to the situation. So, can the old information processing framework really explain this, especially when some organisms do not even possess the kind of neural structures that theory assumes?
SPEAKER_02This is where the older framework of cognition struggles. If we use a purely brain-centered model, we would need one theory for humans, another for wolves, another for jellyfish, and another for plants. But ekological psychology offers concepts that can apply across living systems. In that sense, the world is not fundamentally different for humans and other organisms. The same ecological principles can help us understand all of them.
SPEAKER_00Historically, humans have often been positioned as something separate from the nature: the crown of creation, different from animals, different from plants, and usually this difference is explained through cognition the brain, the higher order thinking. But if we think about football, football is fundamentally about perception and action. And in that sense, it may not be so different from how the other organisms skillfully engage with their environments.
SPEAKER_02This brings us to direct perception. Instead of assuming that the player receives poor information and then processes it through heavy cognitive work, ecological psychology suggests something different. The player or the plant does not need to construct the world inside the brain first. The player becomes directly attuned to what matters in the environment, key information, rich information, action-specifying information.
SPEAKER_00So, what is the task of perception? Its task is to connect the organism with the meaningful properties of the environment. So in football, this means perceiving the information that helps us act skillfully in the game. So for example, passing lanes, space, pressure, movement, timing. The key is perception is active. We perceive in order to act and we act in order to perceive. So these are not separate stages, they are one continuous process.
SPEAKER_02This leads us to an important conclusion. That's why they cannot truly be trained in isolation. They belong together. This is what we mean when we often speak about the human environment system.
SPEAKER_00Let's go back to Jari Littmanen, who we talked about in the last episode. So he is often described as a player with exceptional game intelligence. Why? Parlially because of who he was as a player. So he was not the fastest one. So in order to drive he had to become exceptionally attuned to passing possibilities and spaces. So the environment invited different actions for him than it would for a very fast player.
SPEAKER_02Jarry Littman in Ajax, for example, 94-95 this time, this period of time he was so good in finding different passes to the strikers who then scored. Or actually, very interesting, even though he was low, he often went behind the line and was 1v1 with the keeper. Why is this? How is this possible, J.P, that he could be so many times 1v1 with the keeper?
SPEAKER_00So the traditional view: because he was so intelligent. Because he was low, so he had to be very good with inside his head. But how we see it, he was very well attuned to the key information in a football match. He could see the opportunities, or in a better way saying it, sense the opportunities, all the gaps, all the spaces, and then exploit them in the match situations. That's the key. He was a very skillful player.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, true. He timed his run perfectly. And he understood also what the own players can do. They can do this pass behind the line. I time my run, then I'm 1v1 there. Okei, this brings us to one of the key concepts behind game intelligence or game understanding decision making, namely affordances. And affordances are possibilities for action. Not just what the environment physically kind of contains, but what the player is able to do within it. For Littmanen, the same game situation offers different possibilities than for a fast drippler, for example, or a fast runner. For one player the world appears as a passing possibility, for another it appears as a possibility to beat the opponent with speed.
SPEAKER_00So let's take a younger player with a powerful shot. From an early age they may score many goals and receive positive feedback. Over time the game begins to present itself to them as a shooting opportunity more often than for others. This is not simply better or worse game intelligence. It is a different attunement to affordances. And perhaps one of the most interesting coaching questions becomes: how do we help players perceive new affordances and how do we help them become attuned to richer possibilities for action? This is where coaching becomes deeply important.
SPEAKER_02So in the end of this Back to Nature episode, we have two statements. First, game intelligence or skill is the ability to establish a meaningful relationship with the environment, to perceive what is happening around you and understand how to act within it. From this perspective, no separate cognitive or higher component is required.
SPEAKER_00And the second statement: learning skill is understood as becoming attuned to meaningful ecological information and learning how to organize the body to act effectively in an information-rich environment.
SPEAKER_02So, what we are saying in this episode: back to nature: player skillfulness is the ability to become meaningfully connected with the environment. And learning then becomes the process of attuning to meaningful information in the environment. So perhaps game intelligence is not something mysterious, some mysterious cognitive component. Perhaps it is something much more natural, a form of skill, a form of life, a return to nature. See you next week.