'When you say, “Thermonuclear War", I think you mean “the call to adventure"! The Twilight: 2000 tabletop role-playing game and the postapocalyptic world's imaginary spaces

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Craig, M orcid iconORCID: 0000-0003-1588-1771 (2025) 'When you say, “Thermonuclear War", I think you mean “the call to adventure"! The Twilight: 2000 tabletop role-playing game and the postapocalyptic world's imaginary spaces. Journal of American Studies. pp. 1-20. ISSN 0021-8758

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Abstract

Historians of the Cold War and the nuclear age have largely overlooked the existence of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), while films, comics, novels, and television programmes that tackled the challenging imaginary, yet all-too-possible, wastes of a post-nuclear landscape have been abundantly analysed. As cultural products and tools through which to imagine other worlds, TTRPGs offer powerful insights into how, where, and why certain groups thought about the spectre of nuclear age and how they dealt with this threat by gaming within make-believe post-apocalyptic worlds. This article draws together several threads in its analysis of the American designed and produced Twilight: 2000 TTRPG's historical significance. Through analysing Twilight: 2000 as a case study of how a TTRPG functions as a specific nuclear cultural object in its own right, the article also locates this game as a part of a wider-reaching dystopian fantasy rooted in the massive everyday reality of atomic annihilation. Likewise, the game, its mechanics, setting, and artwork are analysed here as part of a distinctive Cold War culture that permitted participants to derive pleasure and affirmation from fictional 'adventures' in the post-apocalyptic environment.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: 2103 Historical Studies; Cultural Studies
Subjects: E History America > E11 America (General)
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure
Divisions: Humanities and Social Science
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date of acceptance: 29 November 2024
Date of first compliant Open Access: 13 January 2025
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2025 13:45
Last Modified: 14 Nov 2025 12:00
DOI or ID number: 10.1017/S0021875825000283
URI: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/25257
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