World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.

History and use

The history of the World Game has conflicting origins. Fuller was influenced by his studies of war games at the Naval War College, The Game would, according to Fuller, transcend human perception's limits in the electromagnetic spectrum, and allow a rich dataset of global environmental trends.

In 2001, a for-profit educational company named o.s. Earth Inc. purchased the principal assets of the World Game Institute and offered a Global Simulation Workshop that is a "direct descendant of Buckminster Fuller's famous World Game." In 2019, the company transferred its assets to the Schumacher Center for New Economics.

Format

Organizers of a World Game session have a large amount of discretion over the format. The original 1969 workshop version ran for at least fifty hours from June 12 to July 31, and involved 28 people including Fuller. to one day (as offered by the group We R One World), to four to six hours (as carried out by the University of California, San Diego in 1995, to mark the centenary of Fuller's birth) to as short as four hours (as offered by the Global Solutions Lab), and with total player amounts ranging from 15 to hundreds.

The Southern Illinois University curriculum, written by Fuller, does not describe its procedures as rules, but rather as "rudimentary" guidelines. Points were scored based on the sum of solutions cards and currency, with very high-development regions such as Europe, Northern America and Japan starting out at about 110-140 points.

Resources

A universal feature of all World Game sessions is the use of an extremely large Dymaxion map of the world, typically within a 70-foot-by-35-foot rectangle on a surface such as a basketball court.

See also

  • Megagame
  • Model United Nations
  • Peace war game

References

  • World Game Series: Document One
  • Global Simulation Workshop (Commercial)
  • Buckminster Fuller Challenge
  • Global Energy Network Institute
  • An interview article with some statements by Bucky about The World Gameiio

Further reading

  • Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Roberto Trujillo. New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller. (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 2009)