[WorldChanging]: Buckminster
Fuller argued that 'spaceship' earth could sustain a growing population
at a decent standard of living if we used our resources
effectively. Fuller had studied war games at the U.S. Navy War
College, and it occurred to him that you could create a "World Peace
Game" that focused on the logistics necessary to share resources and
make the concept of war obsolete. From this evolved what he called the World GameTM, now called the Global Simulation Workshop.
In May designers and scientists met via the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology to create a massively
multiplayer online game based on Fuller's thinking. [Link]
I added the following to the comment thread:I did the World
Game workshop -- actually a month-long planetary design charrette at
SIU in 1972, then in 1973 at USC -- where we built a fairly
complex-for-the-time, and pretty engaging simulation game, using judges
and scoring tables and poker chips. (...the data was pretty powerful --
making it quite clear that there was no insurmountable resource
sufficiency problem standing in the way of, as Bucky put it, "a world
that works for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through
spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense, or the
disadvantage of anyone.")
In any case, World Game and Bucky's proposed GeoScope gaming
environment -- along with Stafford Beer's cybernetic democracy work in
Chile (described in "Platform for Change") -- were powerful
inspirations for what has become Business Metabolics, my company's
web-based key performance indicator system. (PS: NOT so easy to do...)
It could provide a key component of the Global Simulation Workshop --
and the offer to donate it to BFI for this purpose still stands. (And
to help in any other way that's useful.)
PS (In response to one of the commenters, who said 'Over the years,
people have talked about putting together a dashboard
for Spaceship Earth so we could at least see how fast our handbasket is
hurtling toward Hell.'): The point of a dashboard isn't to watch
us crash (we've got disaster movies for that) but to help us steer this
spaceship out of its dive.
PPS: So where's the World Game Wiki?
10:56:05 PM 
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