STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT WORLD WOES

Imagine a map roughly the size of a basketball court. Add nearly 200 university students in stocking feet, a slide projector and two microphones.

What you have is the World Game Workshop: a four-hour long program in which students solve the problems of the world, while remaining wary its fragile eco-systems.

The game was set up in the University Center Ballroom at Southeast Missouri State University Wednesday night, free of charge to all students or area residents who wanted to participate.

"We are 100 percent in favor of the betterment of humanity, and in a quest to achieve world peace," said Rusanne Bucci, a facilitator from the World Game Institute in Philadelphia. Bucci served as one of the moderators for the game.

Buckminster Fuller, the futurist inventor and engineer, created the game for Expo 67 in Montreal. He hoped the world leaders, sheltered by one of his geodesic domes, would learn some peaceable strategies for settling international disputes. They never played the game.

When he died in 1983, Fuller willed the game to his student, Medard Gabel. Gabel founded the World Game Institute, a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia.

The game was brought to the university largely through the efforts of Lori Gress, the assistant director of campus activities.

"It took a while to find the money," Gress said. "But we did; that's all that counts."

As the participants entered, they were handed an informational guide and a "game piece" that they would learn how to use later. Each participant was handed a year and place in which they would enter "the world," or were assigned to be members of the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and environmental groups.

To give the students a taste for the scale of the map, Nancy Bell, the other facilitator for Tuesday's workshop, called for a volunteer to put place her heel on Cape Girardeau on the map. The woman's toes reached to Peoria, Ill.

"Her foot is 250 miles long, according to the scale of this map," Bell told the audience. "That would make her about 2,000 miles tall. That means the space shuttle would orbit this map at about her ankle."

Bell told the gamers that to the scale of the map, the moon would be about 700 feet from the surface and the sun would be 47 miles away.

In the World Game Workshop, participants representing different regions of the globe face situations based on real world statistics and problems such as illiteracy and hunger.

Solving the problems requires attention to such issues as resource distribution, and energy and food production.

Although some students attended to earn extra credit in courses in which they are enrolled, others came for curiosity's sake.

"I just came to do this ... it sounds interesting," said Christopher T. Boyle, a psychology student at the university.

The institute conducts about 140 workshops a year for everyone from high school students to adults.