Licenced to Play: Espionage Role-Playing Games in the Late Cold War Era

Abstract

Hoping to tap into the massive success of the Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) role-playing game, strategy-game producer Victory Games released James Bond 007: Role-Playing in Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1983. Like D&D, James Bond 007 allowed players to indulge in a world of fantasy and adventure. Unlike D&D, however, the game was set in the contemporary world and offered players a chance to find that adventure in the Cold War era. Using sociologist Wendy Griswold’s “Cultural Diamond” as a theoretical tool, this paper analyses how TSR’s Top Secret and James Bond 007 were part of a more extensive culture system of the early 1980s, especially youth culture (Griswold 2013). In this system, cultural meaning was constructed through the intersection of four main components: the Social World, Cultural Objects, Producers, and Receivers. The Social World component is life during the Cold War, especially throughout the early 1980s, emphasising how the primary receivers, young consumers, viewed this world. The Cultural Object is the James Bond 007 game and other espionage role-playing games, especially TSR’s Top Secret. The Producers of the Cultural Object include the writers and publishers, and the Receivers are the young players and the game administrators.