Diane Boyajian’s face is a picture of frustration. Her forehead is wrinkled, and her mouth is twisted into a frown. She is trying to figure out how to feed the people in her country, keep up the energy supply, increase literacy and stop the illnesses threatening to ravage the population.
It is only 9 a.m.
By 11 a.m., the Delaware 15-year-old will have helped create a place where she wouldn’t mind living. It is all part of architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller’s plan. Instead of playing war games, he wanted people to play peace games.
“It’s funny,” Boyajian says. “When a problem comes up, it seems so easy to fix. But you can’t always just fix things. There are consequences to think through.”
Boyajian, along with a group of high school leaders, is taking part in a World Game Workshop at the Governor’s School for Excellence at the University of Delaware. It is a game that has been played by more than 40,000 people internationally, including executives from AT&T, GTE, General Motors and the World Bank. Members of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress have also taken part.
The World Game Institute, located in Philadelphia, presents the workshops. Fuller created the non-profit, research and education organization in 1972, and it soon started giving the workshops.
The workshops are more of a learning tool than a game, where participants each represent a percentage of the world’s population. Based on cards distributed by facilitators, students take their places on a 35-foot-by-70-foot map that is taped to the floor. Fuller’s dymaxion map, with the North Pole in the center, does not distort the size of the land as most classroom maps do.
Scattered around the map are other participants, some representing the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the media. Participants wear different colored paper hats to distinguish their roles.
Throughout the workshop, participants alternate between feeling overwhelmed and successful as game cards dictate changing events. At times, the players look like they are ready to pull their hair out in frustration. Moments later, they triumphantly brag to peers about how they traded technology for food and solved the hunger problem of their country.
The workshop views the Earth as a gameboard. Game elements include natural resources, technology and problem-solving ingenuity. The players are people who are concerned about making the world a better place. The scenarios are based on global statistics collected from a variety of sources.
Workshop observers say they already see a difference in the way participants think as they play the game.
Jessica Fannin, a 19-year-old Westchester University student, who helped supervise the students, says: “It helps kids relate better. They see that problems are bigger than they are and they need to be good communicators to solve them.”
After the participants listen to a fast-paced 4.5 billion year time line that brings them to the present, they take their assigned places on the map. This five-minute process teaches them their first lesson. As the students take their places, those in Asia are crowded together, while the handful of students in North America are widely spaced. It quickly becomes clear which countries have an abundance and which have to do more with less.
Throughout the day, new problems crop up. On cards dealt by World Game facilitators, countries combat threats of war, earthquakes and disease. Each time a country faces a dilemma, participants take up negotiations. Some students create a public transportation plan to cut down on pollution while others decide to build schools to battle illiteracy. Members of the media give periodic reports. As the game continues, the meaning of the three-hour workshop is becoming clear.
“They see that what they are doing does have an impact,” said Scott Chappell, one of two facilitators of the game. “It’s pretty powerful.”
Facilitators hope students will come away with an understanding of the interdependence of geography, history and world events by defining the relationship of their region to the world.
“It gives them a new perspective on themselves, their community and finally, the world,” says Chappell. “It shows them that what happens here impacts what happens there. It refocuses their priorities, gives them more of a global perspective.”
As those at the World Game Institute watched the success of the game, they realized that women’s issues would fit in well to the program. They recently created a Gender Issues Game.
“We’re trying to make people aware of what issues women encounter,” said Christine Boucher, associate executive director of development, public relations and publications.
They didn’t have to look far to find inequalities. Some of the statistics they plan to add to the new workshop come from the United Nations publication “The World’s Women 1995: Trends and Statistics.” Examples include the following: Ninety percent of all refugees are women and children; women in Bangladesh earn an average of 42 percent of what men earn, and women in Japan are expected to resign from their jobs if they get pregnant.
“The research really opened my eyes,” said Boucher. “A lot of us here are uninformed about what the conditions are like for women in the rest of the world. There are inequities everywhere.”
During the new game, participants will go through a women’s history time line. They will lead the new workshop armed with gender-specific problems, incorporating statistics on mortality, rape, education levels and access to health care.
Modeled on the World Game workshop, the gender-issues game is designed to help participants understand the major problems that concern the women’s rights movement today. Disparities across gender lines in several socio-economic indicators are emphasized, along with their historical context and current consequences. The game will show the real social and economic costs of gender inequities and teach participants to develop strategies for solving problems.
The institute expects the new game to be an effective educational tool, as students taking part in the Delaware workshop bring up issues of equality without being prompted and question the difference they can make.
In case the participants begin to feel they can’t make a dent in the world’s problems, facilitators present the example of the elimination of smallpox. Chappell explains to participants the world’s doctors had known how to eliminate the disease for a century, but it was not until the 1970s that a group of European doctors actually did it. He adds that several developed nations were spending $200 million a year each to combat the illness. The doctors concluded that for $300 million, enough vaccine could be produced to inoculate everyone worldwide. Several nations then funded the project and smallpox was eradicated in 1978.
In the end, Chappell said he hopes that participants understand they can make a difference. “They see that they can be part of the solution,” Chappell said. “Now they realize that some of these same problems are in their neighborhoods: poverty, illiteracy. They realize they can do something about it. When looking globally, don’t leave your hometown out.”
The participants seem to have gotten the message.
“It really opens your eyes to what is going on in the world,” said Helen Lewis, 15. “Part of it is frustrating. These problems are so big. But you also see that they can be solved. It’s empowering.”
WOMEN IN THE WORLD
The World Game Institute has created a Gender Issues Game in response to a UN report that women were the world’s most undervalued resource. The report said:
– Women are roughly half of the population, but they comprise two-thirds of the world’d illiterate population.
– At least 60 million girls worldwide are without access to primary education.
– Women represent 41% of all workers in the developed countries, and 34% worldwide. Their wages are 30% to 40% less than those of men for comparable work.
– Women own 1% of the world’s property.
