Hugin & Munin Journal

Cultist Simulator is a game about becoming the sort of person who should probably have stopped reading three books ago. Weather Factory’s 2018 occult card game is difficult to classify and often difficult to like. Its hostility is part of the design: timers, incomplete explanations, sudden failures and repeated beginnings turn curiosity into a practical danger. The frustration is not separate from the atmosphere. Much of the atmosphere is produced by never being entirely certain what the next experiment will cost. That defence only goes so far. Uncertainty can make discovery feel earned, but repetition does not become profound merely because it takes place beside forbidden books. Cultist Simulator is most impressive when its opacity makes the player think like an amateur occultist. It is weakest when the same opacity leaves the player performing routines they already understand while waiting for the interesting part to return. Promotional image: Cultist Simulator,...

The old forbidden book had one advantage over artificial intelligence: it could be locked in a tower. That did not guarantee safety. In myth and fantasy, someone eventually finds the key, deciphers the inscription, opens the tomb or steals fire from the gods. The image nevertheless assumes a boundary. Dangerous knowledge has a location, a guardian and a threshold that must be crossed before the trouble begins. Artificial intelligence does not fit that picture neatly. Capabilities move through companies, state laboratories, research papers, cloud services, downloadable model weights, commercial products and informal experimentation. Some systems remain tightly controlled; others can be adapted and run beyond the original developer’s oversight. There is no single book, tower or lock. In an earlier essay on forbidden knowledge in fantasy , I argued that the trope is not really hostile to learning. It asks what happens when understanding arrives before judgment. AI converts that old ...

Modern public culture usually treats knowledge as an obvious good. Education liberates, secrecy protects abuse, and better information makes people harder to deceive. Fantasy accepts much of that argument, but it rarely accepts it without suspicion. The genre is crowded with books that should not be opened, names that should not be spoken, tombs that should remain sealed and truths that do not set anyone free. Characters seek understanding and receive power, but also obligation, contamination, guilt or ruin. The danger is often not that the knowledge is false. It is that the knowledge works. Forbidden-knowledge stories are therefore more interesting than simple warnings against curiosity. Their strongest versions ask what happens when understanding arrives before judgment, or when capability grows faster than the institutions and habits meant to restrain it. A spell may be learned by someone too angry to use it well; a prophecy may be understood by someone too frightened not to act...