CONCEPT
The World Game
Fuller's 1961 proposal for a design-science alternative to war games — a simulation of global resources, needs, and constraints designed to identify how every passenger of Spaceship Earth can win. Finally computationally feasible.
The World Game was Fuller's 1961 proposal for a comprehensive simulation of the entire global system — all resources, all needs, all constraints, all populations, all ecological parameters — designed not to identify how one faction could defeat another but to identify how the system could be arranged so that every participant benefits. War games asked how to win. The World Game asked how to make winning unnecessary by designing arrangements that serve all participants simultaneously. The proposal was not utopian in the pejorative sense; it was a design specification expressed in the vocabulary of engineering. Fuller argued the world's resources, properly inventoried and comprehensively deployed, were sufficient to provide adequate food, shelter, energy, education, and meaningful occupation for every human being without ecological degradation. This was not a moral claim but a calculation — one he insisted could be verified through rigorous simulation. The game was never fully built. Until now, the computational barrier was insurmountable.
