World Game
Fuller's cooperative simulation for making the world work for all of humanity.
World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation that Buckminster Fuller developed in 1961 to generate solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. Conceived as an alternative to military war games, it spread Fuller's Dymaxion map on the floor and asked a group of players to cooperatively solve a series of resource scenarios, displacing the nation-state viewpoint in favor of a holistic "total world" perspective. Fuller framed its objective as making "the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone."
Fuller first proposed World Game as a core curriculum at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he and executive director John McHale founded the World Resources Inventory to gather the data the game required. He proposed it for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, though that plan was rejected. Fuller identified the game closely with his "Guinea Pig B" experiment and his lifework of comprehensive anticipatory design science, and claimed he had been playing it "longhand," without computers, since 1927.
In 1972 the World Game Institute was founded in Philadelphia by Fuller, Medard Gabel, Howard J. Brown, and others. The Institute later published resources such as the World Energy Data Sheet (1980) and, by 1993, an educational software package called Global Recall that bundled global data, maps, and problem-solving tools for students. In 2001 the for-profit company o.s. Earth, Inc. acquired the Institute's principal assets and continues to offer a Global Simulation Workshop described as a direct descendant of Fuller's World Game.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller — the central figure
- World Game Institute — the Philadelphia organization that carried the game forward
- Medard Gabel — co-founder and steward of the Institute
- John McHale — co-founder of the World Resources Inventory
- Recent Fuller Scholarship and Developments (2020-2026) (Recent Fuller Scholarship and Developments (2020-2026)) — post-2020 developments touching this topic
- Modern Applications of Fuller's Ideas (Modern Applications of Fuller's Ideas) — contemporary deployments of this principle
- Design Science Primer: Tools for Changing the World (Design Science Primer: Tools for Changing the World) — related work
- Geoscope — the 200-foot data-display globe designed as World Game's primary visualization
- Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science — the full methodological framework the World Game embodies
- Spaceship Earth — the concept motivating the game's whole-planet perspective
- Trimtab — the individual-agency metaphor World Game embodies at global scale
- Fuller's Teaching Career — the SIU context where World Game was developed
- World Resources Inventory — the SIU data-gathering project that fed World Game
- Fuller and Sustainability — the sustainability legacy World Game helped build
Sources
- World Game (Wikipedia)