Oh Halcyon '81

You know what ruins a good role-playing game? Tension defeating technologies. There are two primary offenders that come up over and over again and as we move forward with these two pieces of tech they are actually converging into a single plot problem. The two offenders are:

1. Cell Phones 
2. The Internet

The ability to have continuous, virtually instantaneous, access to super powerful encrypted communications and information sources renders many types of problems trivial, and hence many kinds of stories pointless.

Worse, most of the people I game with are not only technically proficient, but are actually working on technologies related to, or peripherally affected by, these two technologies meaning it's impossible to just ignore the problem or use some terrible weak plot device to take the technology off the table.

The solution is in 1981, lookup some events from 81:
- the Cold War in full swing and its outcome is not yet decided
- the government was not yet exercising total surveillance of the people (but was definitely working on it)
- many inventions that exist today could exist as 'sci-fi' tech (micronized communications, super-computers, exotic materials science, theoretical physics)
- going down the path of an alternate future from a point in the past would free up any sense of being beholden to current events

It seems to me that any modern game that does not specifically use the Internet as part of it's plot is best set in 1981. A golden year to start your games.