World Peace Games

The news can be full of complicated problems. You might wonder how do we even begin to solve these issues. How do we stop people fighting? And how do we create world peace?

OLIVIA MASON, REPORTER: They’re questions that top world leaders struggle to deal with pretty much every day. But what if I asked you to find the answers?

Well, I’m not going to ask you to do that, but this guy might.

JOHN HUNTER: I’m John Hunter the inventor of the World Peace Game and actually the CEO of the World Peace Game Foundation.

The World Peace Game is kinda like a board game but it’s also way more than that.

JOHN HUNTER: Oh my. The World Peace Game is a gigantic structural geo-political simulation and essentially we have a number of different countries pitted against each other in every way; politically, socially, militarily and economically and they’re pitted against each other on four different levels – outer space, aircraft level, ground and sea, and undersea level and the children who are playing the roles of cabinets and agencies in the world have to sort through all of this chaos and actually create solutions to solve some of world’s toughest problems.

At the beginning of the game, the participants get detailed documents explaining the problems they have to solve and get assigned different roles within the game. There’s prime ministers, chief financial officers, and a heap of different staff in organisations like the United Nations and the World Bank. And then, they have to work together to figure it all out.

KID: So basically each country has a budget from the beginning and you win the game by each country’s budget being higher than before and all 23 crises solved.

John says he came up with the game when he first started working as a teacher and had to teach his students about what was going on in Africa.
JOHN HUNTER: I thought how am I gonna do that it’s a very complex place but I thought I’d make a game of it.

Since then, it’s grown to include problems facing the entire world.

JOHN HUNTER: We have everything from ethnic and religious and minority rights and problems, religious struggles, we have breakaway republics, we have water and famine issues, we have poverty, we have pollution, we have fishing rights issues, everything we have in the world, cyber warfare all of that is in the World Peace Game. We just sort of rip it from the headlines and modify it appropriately for children, and in a bloodless way they always, always, always save the world.

John says that while it is possible to lose the game, that’s never happened and he reckons it shows that kids are actually pretty amazing at this stuff, and while it’s difficult, these guys say it’s really fun.

KID: It’s helping me to understand more of the values and things you need to learn for life.

KID: I think it’s a big challenge to solve the problems in the world obviously there’s a lot more problems than just on this game board behind me.

KID: It’s the best feeling in the world when you solve a crisis, and everyone is just jumping around like yay we solved a crisis. I think for generations to come this is gonna be the game that is helping to bring up new leaders and all people who want to save the world.