THURSDAY

Well you know, we’d all like to change the world. The late geodesic dome inventor and all-around visionary Buckminster Fuller (pictured) certainly planned on it, crusading for the elimination of hunger, fossil-fuel use, and poverty. He predicted in 1959 that the last would be vanquished by 2000 and was convinced that any failure to do so would be a matter of political will, not knowledge. To demonstrate this, the 20th-century Renaissance man invented the World Game, in which participants strive to “make the world work for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense, or the disadvantage of anyone.” The game is conducted on a Dymaxion Map, a Fuller-invented cartographic system that represents the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion, appearing as a single island in a single ocean on the expanse of “Spaceship Earth.” Each player represents a percentage of the world’s population and cooperates with others to solve global problems. Anyone who’s ever participated in any microcosm of human society—high school, say—may have doubts. As the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground put it: “Tell me, who was it who first declared…that man does evil only because he does not know his own interests?…Oh, what a pure innocent child!” Representing innocence at this exercise is instructor Medard Gabel, the former executive director of the World Game Institute, which he co-founded with Fuller, and an expert on international energy and food distribution. Gabel leads Buckminster Fuller’s World Game Workshop at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, July 8, at the Smithsonian Castle’s Commons Dining Room, 1000 Jefferson Drive, SW. $30. (202) 357-3030. (Mark Jenkins)