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 (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• World Game Institute (World Game Institute) — the Philadelphia organization that carried the game forward
• Medard Gabel (Medard Gabel) — co-founder and steward of the Institute
• John McHale (John McHale) — co-founder of the World Resources Inventory

Sources

• World Game (Wikipedia)