John Hunter is a public school teacher who created the World Peace Game in 1978.
His first job was in Richmond, Virginia teaching gifted students. There were no manuals to follow, no standards in gifted education. He was determined to declare a space for his students where they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding.
The game started out in an inner city urban school in 2978 as as a four foot by five foot plywood board. He was creating a lesson for his students on Africa. He put all of the problems of the world there and wanted to solve them he wanted them to be, “immersed and learn the feeling f=of learning through their bodies,: instead of his just lecturing or book reading. It has evolved into a four foot by four foot by four foot Plexiglass structure with four Plexiglass layers. It contains:
An outer space level with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining
An air and space level with clouds that they push around
A territorial air spaces and air forces
A ground level and sea level with thousands of pieces on it
An undersea level with submarines and undersea mining
There are four countries that the kids get to make up the names of, some are rich, some are poor. The countries contain:
Different assets, commercial and military
Their own cabinet
A Prime Minister
Secretary of State
Minister of Defense
CFO or Comptroller
Mr. Hunter chooses the Prime Minister based on his relationship with them, but they can turn it down. The students also choose their own cabinet. The game also contains:
A World Bank
Arms dealers
A United Nations
A weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather
The game not only contains all that is listed above, but also a 13 page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. Some of the problems are:
Ethnic and minority tensions
Chemical and nuclear spills
Nuclear Proliferation
Oil spills
Environmental disasters
water rights disputes
Breakaway republics
Famine
Endangered species
Global warming
He also puts a a saboteur in the game, the child is trying to save the world on the surface, but they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. “They do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply.”
They are also reading some of “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, the 4th graders, “understand how not to follow, at first they do, the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.” One of the Ideas for this game came from Stewart Brand with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force and some of students have created a peace form in the game. The students run the game, Mr. Hunters is just the “clock watcher, clarifier and/or facilitator.”
Hunter says that every game is different, some are more about social issues, economic issues, warfare, etc. He also says that, “if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world, they may save us all. If only.”
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