Praxichnology: Naming the Field That Reads Footprints in Designed Environments — From Serious Games to AI

Multiple fields — serious games analytics, learning analytics, human-computer interaction, expertise research, sport science, and the behavioral analysis of AI agents — produce and read traces of situated activity inside instrumented environments, treating the records as evidence of learning, performance, and the development of expertise. The trace-reading is not in dispute. What has been missing is a field-level name for it. Without one, the foundational case for trace-as-evidence has been rebuilt paper after paper, and the cost compounds when the work travels across host disciplines whose readers have not seen the prior literature. This preprint proposes praxichnology — from Greek praxis (purposeful action), ichnos (track or footprint), and -logy (study of) — as that name. The field is defined as the disciplined study of traces produced through situated activity in designed environments, used to infer the development of actors through learning, performance, and expertise. Two intellectual ancestors are named: Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857–1927), for the empirical-realist commitment that observable action is admissible evidence of integrated psychological life; and Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), for the operational principle that the trace of an actor's path is jointly determined by actor and environment, and that the means recorded in the trace can be read for the end the actor was acting toward. Either alone is insufficient; together they constitute the inheritance. The preprint distinguishes praxichnology from cognate fields (ethology, paleontological ichnology), introduces a three-root scope diagnostic, and leaves the field theoretically open along two axes — theoretical commitment, and substrate, instrumentation, or actor — including an artificial praxichnology covering AI agents and human-AI collaborative work. Its purpose is to substantiate the term, name its ancestors, and stake priority in the open-science record so that downstream methodological papers and other researchers may cite it as a stable reference.