This book studies R. Buckminster Fuller's World Game and similar world games, past and present.
Proposed by Fuller in 1964 and first played in colleges and universities across North America at a time of growing ecological crisis, the World Game attempted to turn data analysis, systems modelling, scenario building, computer technology, and information design to more egalitarian ends to meet human needs. It challenged players to redistribute finite planetary resources more equitably, to 'make the world work'. Criticised and lauded in equal measure, the World Game has evolved through several formats and continues today in correspondence with debates on planetary stewardship, gamification, data management, and the democratic deficit. This book looks again at how the World Game has been played, focusing on its architecture, design, and gameplay. With hindsight, the World Game might appear naĂŻve, utopian, or technocratic, but we share its problems, if not necessarily its solutions.
Such a study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, game studies, media studies, architecture, and the environmental humanities.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Buckminster Fuller's World Game and Its Legacy by Timothy Stott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Global Warming & Climate Change. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
âSpaceship Earthâ named a technological object, a political arena, and a matter of environmental concern that, by the end of the 1960s, influenced both United Nations (UN) sustainable development policy and countercultural experiments in ecological redesign and sustainable living, especially in the United States.1 The World Game attempted to model the life-support systems of this Spaceship, to make them visible, playable, governable, and, for some, optimally functional. âWe are all astronauts nowâ, wrote Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1968,2 in command of an âintegrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in totalâ.3 This made the World Game a âgreat world logistics gameâ for planetary systems,4 the aim of which was to âmake the total system work more efficientlyâ and for everyone.5
Two major architectural projects were proposed for the World Game, namely the US Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal and the World Resources Simulation Center (WRSC) planned for the Edwardsville campus of Southern Illinois University (SIU), envisaged as the first stages of a global network of command centres. Neither project was completed as planned, and the actual architectures of the Game were workshops and seminars, still global in scope but less technologically sophisticated.
On 10 May 1965, economist and systems theorist Kenneth Boulding presented a paper titled âEarth as a Space Shipâ to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Committee on Space Sciences. Humans had to move beyond local, short-term thinking.
Man must live in the whole system, in which he must recycle his wastes and really face up to the problem of increase in material entropy which his activities create. In a space ship, there are no sewers.6
The metaphor of Spaceship Earth was a call to environmental action. Its holism struck a chord with the US counterculture, exemplified by the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) motto, âWe canât put it together. It is togetherâ. For example, in March 1970, the WEC included a supplement on the World Game, written by Gene Youngblood based on several articles previously published in the Los Angeles Free Press, and featured on its cover (Figure 1.1) a photomontage of five young hippies playing volleyball with a photograph of the Earth, above a quote from Fuller:
I travel around the world a great deal, and everywhere I hear humanity saying, âWe are not against any other human beings; we feel the world ought to work properlyâ. Everywhere they say itâs our politicians that get us into trouble.12
The Earth photograph is that taken by the Applications Technology Satellite 3 (ATS-3) in 1967, used on the cover of the WECâs first edition, published in the autumn of 1968. This photomontage asserts the WEC and its subscribers as defenders and agents of ecological holism and presents the World Game as a version of Earthball, a game conceived by Stewart Brand in 1966 in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War to let players âunderstand war by appreciating and experiencing the source of it within themselvesâ.13 Earthball then became a symbol of Earth Day in the early 1970s and spawned the New Games Movement, led by Bernie de Koven.
The Biggest System
For Brand and others, such whole earth photographs gave a unified image of Spaceship Earth.14 The World Game, however, sought to model the Spaceshipâs planetary systems. For Fuller, although planetary systems might be âextraordinaryâ and âunpredictableâ (or âsynergisticâ, in Fullerâs jargon â what we might now call emergent), and not reducible to statistical or probabilistic analysis, they never work âin ways you canât modelâ. âThe most important and useful work Iâve been able to do will be achieving this return to modelabilityâ, he declared in a 1971 interview.15
The World Gameâs âsystems approachâ, which Fullerâs research assistant John McHale (see Chapter 4) called âa new social instrument for complex planningâ, aimed to define the functional requirements of planetary systems and identify âwithin their design various feedback sub-procedures which regulate the system towards the desired optimal end functionâ.16 This approach adapted the general systems theory (GST) of the Austrian biologist Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, first outlined in the early 1950s,17 and combined it with economist John von Neumannâs game theory, which studies how strategic interaction between rational economic actors produces intentional and non-intentional outcomes.18
In more detail, first, GST provided, in the words of Von Bertalanffy, a âgeneral science of âwholenessââ to study isomorphisms across open, complex systems and integrate the otherwise disparate fields of biology, robotics, information theory, sociology, economics, and psychology.19 GST made sense of âthe complexity of the world⊠in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting [it] into its parts and looking at each in isolationâ.20 In notes for an undated World Game presentation at SIU, Fuller made clear that GST enabled him to model âSpaceship Earth as a closed systemâ.21 In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he wrote that GST helped him to âthink in terms of wholesâ.22 Medard Gabel, one of the Seminar players who was employed by SIU from 1969 to work on propagating the World Game, wrote that GST was a
tool for competent and comprehensive problem-solving [because it demonstrated that] the known behaviour of the whole system and the known behaviour of some of its parts makes possible discovery or true prediction of the remainder of its parts.23
This parts/whole correlation made the World Gameâs strategies âas comprehensive and correct as is presently possibleâ.24 Knowledge of the whole, or what Fuller called the âbiggest systemâ, meant that players could âautomatically avoid leaving out any strategically critical variablesâ.25 With this knowledge, too, design scientists â the crew of Spaceship Earth â could learn the âuniverseâs gameâ and plan the future. âIf you know something about you...