Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy

Timothy Stott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367483906
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000427547
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: History of Art

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 naïve, 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.

1 Aboard Spaceship Earth

‘Spaceship Earth’ 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. ‘We are all astronauts now’, wrote Fuller in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1968,² in command of an ‘integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total’.³ This made the World Game a ‘great world logistics game’ for planetary systems,⁴ the aim of which was to ‘make the total system work more efficiently’ 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 ‘Earth as a Space Ship’ 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

Also, in 1965, US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, used the metaphor to refer to a fragile, threatened planet for which the international community was responsible.⁷ The following year, Boulding argued that the Earth was not an open system but a closed system, visualised by a ‘closed sphere’ rather than the ‘illimitable plane’ of the Mercator projection. This closed sphere required a cyclical, solar-powered ‘spaceman economy’ to replace the ‘cowboy economy’ of limitless resource extraction and waste.⁸ Spaceship Earth would follow cybernetic principles of feedback, regulation, and efficient management. Conversely, life was reduced to its essential conditions as, faced with a looming environmental crisis, the planet was to be placed on life support.⁹ In 1966, the influential economist and journalist Dame Barbara Ward (later Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth) published Spaceship Earth, in which she argued that a new planetary responsibility, made operative through progressive taxation, would correct geopolitical inequality. ‘Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity’, she wrote. ‘Our inability to do anything but live together physically is not matched by any of the institutions that would enable us to live together decently’.¹⁰ Largely due to the advocacy of Ward, care for Spaceship Earth also shaped the ideals of sustainable development, institutionalised through the likes of the International Institute for Environment and Development, an environmental policy and action research organisation founded by Ward in 1973, and reoriented official UN policy on the environment. For the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, she co-authored the report Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet with the American microbiologist René Dubos. At this Conference, which charged itself with outlining, as Ward wrote, ‘what should be done to maintain earth as a place suitable for human life not only now, but also for future generations’, the US counterculture, mediated by entrepreneur Stewart Brand, sought common purpose with the UN.¹¹

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, ‘We can’t put it together. It is together’. 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, ‘We are not against any other human beings; we feel the world ought to work properly’. Everywhere they say it’s our politicians that get us into trouble.¹²

Figure 1.1 Cover of World Game supplement, Whole Earth Catalog, March 1970, Menlo Park: Portola Institute Inc. Courtesy of Stewart Brand.

The Earth photograph is that taken by the Applications Technology Satellite 3 (ATS-3) in 1967, used on the cover of the WEC’s 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 ‘understand war by appreciating and experiencing the source of it within themselves’.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 Spaceship’s planetary systems. For Fuller, although planetary systems might be ‘extraordinary’ and ‘unpredictable’ (or ‘synergistic’, in Fuller’s jargon – what we might now call emergent), and not reducible to statistical or probabilistic analysis, they never work ‘in ways you can’t model’. ‘The most important and useful work I’ve been able to do will be achieving this return to modelability’, he declared in a 1971 interview.¹⁵

The World Game’s ‘systems approach’, which Fuller’s research assistant John McHale (see Chapter 4) called ‘a new social instrument for complex planning’, aimed to define the functional requirements of planetary systems and identify ‘within their design various feedback sub-procedures which regulate the system towards the desired optimal end function’.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 Neumann’s 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 ‘general science of “wholeness”’ 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 ‘the complexity of the world… in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting [it] into its parts and looking at each in isolation’.²⁰ In notes for an undated World Game presentation at SIU, Fuller made clear that GST enabled him to model ‘Spaceship Earth as a closed system’.²¹ In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he wrote that GST helped him to ‘think in terms of wholes’.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 Game’s strategies ‘as comprehensive and correct as is presently possible’.²⁴ Knowledge of the whole, or what Fuller called the ‘biggest system’, meant that players could ‘automatically avoid leaving out any strategically critical variables’.²⁵ With this knowledge, too, design scientists – the crew of Spaceship Earth – could learn the ‘universe’s game’ and plan the future. ‘If you know something about you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Aboard Spaceship Earth
• 2 The First World Game Seminar
• 3 Ecogame
• 4 Ecologies of the Future
• 5 World Gaming
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index