World Game

For the international multi-sports event, see World Games. For the Doctor Who novel, see World Game (Doctor Who). For the Australian soccer show, see The World Game.

World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 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

Fuller first publicly proposed the concept as the core curriculum at the (then new) Southern Illinois University Carbondale, as a reaction to extensive news coverage of the Pentagon's war games. He founded there, together with its then executive director John McHale, the World Resources Inventory, an institute responsible for conducting the research required for the game launch. Fuller proposed it in 1964 for the U.S. pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but the project was eventually rejected.

In a preamble to World Game documents released in 1970, Fuller identified it very closely with his 'Guinea Pig 'B' experiment' and his 'Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science' lifework. He claimed intellectual property rights as well to control what he considered to be misapplication of his idea by others. He also claimed he had been playing it 'longhand' without the assistance of computers since 1927.

Over fifty hours from June 12 to July 31, 1969, Fuller and 27 grad students from a variety of disciplines met on the court of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, to play the first instance of the World Game, focused on ending energy poverty by giving all the world population 2000 gigawatt-hours per person per year; the final strategy revolved around constructing more hydropower.

In 1972, the World Game Institute was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Fuller, Medard Gabel, Howard J. Brown and others.

In 1980, the World Game Institute and the World Resources Inventory published the World Energy Data Sheet. The World Energy Data Sheet compiled a nation by nation summary of energy production, resources, and consumption. The information was compiled in tables and map formats. The project was researched by Seth Snyder and overseen by Medard Gabel. The work was used during a World Game in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1980.

By 1993, the World Game Institute developed and sold an educational software package called Global Recall, which contained global data, maps, an encyclopedia of world problems, and tools for developing solutions to world problems. The package was a computer-based simulation game intended for use by high school and college students in learning about world problems and how to solve them.

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 closed and transferred its assets to the Schumacher Center for New Economics.

Gameplay, format and resources

Format

Organizers of a World Game session have a wide range of discretion over the format. The original 1969 workshop version ran for at least fifty hours from June 12 to July 31, and involved Fuller and 27 grad students from a variety of disciplines on the court of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and was captured on film by Herbert Matter for the documentary The World Game. However, versions of the World Game exist with durations ranging from as long as an academic semester (e.g. the 1967 Southern Illinois University curriculum), to one day (as offered by the group We R One World), to ten hours (as carried out by the University of California, San Diego in 1995) to four hours (as offered by the Global Solutions Lab), and with total player amounts ranging from 15 to 100.

The Southern Illinois University curriculum, written by Fuller, does not describe its procedures as rules, but rather as "rudimentary" guidelines. Each World Game session has an overarching goal, from ending energy poverty (the original workshop's goal, met by allowing all people on Earth 2 gigawatt-hours per year through increased hydropower), to improving transportation, to ending world hunger, building world peace, and solving climate change. All players must work together, ostensibly as one common team, to develop strategies for meeting this goal using the latest data, preferably in as short a time or as efficiently as possible—an analogous video or board game format would be cooperative gameplay within a real-time strategy setting.

Fuller proposed one model for how the World Game would be played farther in the future: after a week of studying a given problem, the players would partake in multiple rounds of peer review and negotiations. Colleague Medard Gabel described Fuller's vision as follows, using the example of world hunger:

The team or individual that demonstrated how, using current technology and known resources, hunger could be eliminated in ten years, would “win”. The team that could show how it could be done in a shorter time, or by using less resources, or costing less, or accomplishing more than one thing at a time, such as providing clean water as well as eliminating malnutrition, would win round 2. Round 3 would be won by an effort that was even “better”. The next week the focus would shift to energy, or health or education. Eventually the focus would return to food. These efforts, as pointed out above, were not intended as academic exercises. Each new strategy that incrementally improved the method for solving a problem was one step closer to implementation in Fuller’s view.

The company o.s.Earth, which held the intellectual property for the licensed World Game version, formatted its 2000s sessions thusly: 10 teams of players representing each region of the world were obligated to form negotiation strategies. There were also eight teams representing facilitators: four represented fictional mega-corporations as stand-ins the private sectors of each region, while four represented analogs of the World Health Organization, UNESCO, UN Environment Programme, and UN Commission on Human Rights. The remaining two teams represented the United Nations itself, and the world's news media. Most of the action in the game centered on three 20-minute rounds of trade negotiations to ensure that all teams' needs were met.

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 feet-by-35-feet rectangle on a surface such as a basketball court. This projection is intended to depict the world's landmasses and population without reinforcing cultural perceptions of the Global North and Global South divide.

Players of the World Game are usually given huge collections of data in the form of documents from the United Nations, world atlases, and the organizers (in the Southern Illinois University curriculum, from Fuller's own World Design Science Decade series). These documents can list data ranging from material production numbers and inventory sizes, to population sizes, numbers of news outlets and televisions, and other such statistics as needed, but will almost always include time series and trend forecasts to ensure adjustment of each strategy.

Reception

In 1995, Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry covered the UCSD session, and lightheartedly compared it to the board game Monopoly. He also noted Gabel's role in expanding the World Game into the area of briefing corporate clients.

In 2021, arts professor Timothy Stott published a book titled Buckminster Fuller's World Game and its Legacy, which analyzed the World Game and its history. He found that there were extensive contrasts between its purported stateless, cosmopolitan approach to world problems and its conception during the height of 1960s U.S. technological and cultural hegemony, as well as tensions between its apolitical, anarchic aspirations and technocratic character. He also found that participants often failed to grasp and manipulate the complex systems of the game.

External links

• 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 Game

Further reading

• Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Roberto Trujillo. New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller. (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 2009) ISBN 0-8047-6279-1