FROG 2024 | Malcom Craig | TTRPGs and the Cold War nuclear threat

Histories of Wars That Never Were: Tabletop role-playing games and the Cold War nuclear threat
by
Malcom Craig
Abstract
This talk will explore the history and impact of post-apocalyptic tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) of the 1970s and 1980s. Popular memory and scholarly study of the first two decades of TTRPGs are understandably dominated by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). D&D always has been the most famous and widespread of all such games. There were many other games, though, that did not hew to high fantasy settings and instead offered much darker, more immediate worlds for gamers to explore. Amongst these were games that dealt with one of the period’s most pressing global issues: the threat of nuclear devastation. Such games dealt with the contemporary prospect of fiery annihilation in diverse ways. From the visceral post-World War Three landscape of Poland in Twilight: 2000, through the surrealist grotesquery of a mutated far-future in Gamma World, to the Marxist (Brothers, not the father of communism) absurdism of Paranoia, the nuclear age and its terrifying ultimate consequences were present in a diverse range of different game experiences. What was implicit or explicit in all of these were the acknowledgement of the fragility of the world around them, the threat posed by the Cold War nuclear standoff, and their implicit invitation to players to somehow deal with this through play. Through documentary analysis and accompanying oral history, this talk will assess how the history and impact of these games significantly add to our understanding of Cold War ‘nuclear culture’, positioning them as a means for imagining, reacting to, and potentially coping with all-too-possible futures.
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This talk was part of the conference "FROG - Future and Reality of Gaming" 2024 | "Gaming the Apocalypse" | 11 - 13 October 2024 | www.frogvienna.at
FROG 2024 is organised by the Center for Applied Game Studies (University for Continuing Education Krems) and funded by the Austrian Federal Chancellery (Sektion VI - Families and Youth).