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,"[1] thus increasing the quality of life for all people.
Fuller first publicly proposed the concept in 1967 as the core curriculum at the (then new) Southern Illinois University Carbondale, in reaction to extensive news coverage of the Pentagon's war games.
[2] 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.
[3] In a preamble to World Game documents for the curriculum released in 1971, Fuller identified it very closely with his 'Guinea Pig 'B' experiment' and his 'Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science' lifework.
[1][4] Nevertheless, Fuller's proposal imagined "a vast computerized network that could process, map, and visualize environmental information drawn from, among other sources, Russian and American spy satellites.
Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations, or any other conceivable form of energy.
[6][7][3] 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),[4] to one day (as offered by the group We R One World),[11] to four to six hours (as carried out by the University of California, San Diego in 1995, to mark the centenary of Fuller's birth)[2][12] to as short as four hours (as offered by the Global Solutions Lab), and with total player amounts ranging from 15 to hundreds.
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 three rounds of peer review and negotiations.
The remaining two teams represented the United Nations' principal organs and aid programs, and the world's news media, which would report live on the Game's progress.
Most of the action in the game centered on three 20-minute rounds of trade negotiations to ensure that all teams' needs were met, with a few dozen minutes at the end set aside for reflection.
They were obliged to negotiate with mega-corporation and UN analogues for these cards, which could be purchased with oversized poker chips representing large amounts of money; these were fitted into plastic trays.
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.