Ideas That Kill You: Primer to Infohazards In TTRPGs
What is an Infohazard? What are the types of Infohazards?
An infohazard is a piece of information that is dangerous to hold or disseminate. It may be for multiple reasons (examples given in parentheses):
- Someone doesn't want people to know it, and will hurt those who hold it/release it (knowledge of national secrets, or trade secrets).
- It causes a change in behaviour in those who hold it, one that may lead to social instability or loss of meaning/ability to function in society (fascist or communist ideology, knowledge about an incoming asteroid)
- They may be used to cause damage to self or others (knowledge on how to build a weapon, or of how to use a common resource to create lots of energy).
- Holding them is directly dangerous (information not designed for being inside a human mind that damages it, or informational plagues that cause physical symptoms) One must also note three things when looking at this classification:
- It is not complete, stranger kinds of hazards may arise.
- Given hazards may combine - there's nothing that stops a king from not wanting people to know how to cause damage to people, or for an anomalous piece of information to cause social unrest.
- Infohazards don't need to be false or true to work. True information may be an infohazard, like the knowledge of climate change causing feelings of hopelessness. False information may also be an infohazard, like the idea that AIDS is only an issue for queer people causing the spread of HIV.
How to use them in our games?
Was there ever any situation where your players caused themselves issues due to information they gained? Have they ever decided to go too deep into the dungeon due to a treasure map? Have they ever learned what they shouldn't have and were hunted because of that? If so, then you probably already used an infohazard without realising! That being said, it is useful to know when and how you use them, so that you may bring the most enjoyment to everyone at the table. Here is some advice:
What makes most infohazards hazardous is not just the information itself, but the time and location.
What I mean is that the idea that a king is a philanderer doesn't matter much if the king has been dead for 50 years, and the knowledge of oil's usage for power generation would be a game-changer in victorian england. How much damage information may cause depends on where it is placed - thus, if you want to create some informational hazards, remember that they usually have an expiration date, and irrelevance distance.
An infohazard usually doesn't force you to act on it, instead it presents dangerous options.
Just because you know that the prince has embezzled royal funds doesn't mean that you have to tell anyone about it. It doesn't mean that everyone knows that you know. Only when you decide to act on this hazardous information it will cause you any harm. And yet, it is also often tempting, like with the energy sources examples.
The most dangerous infohazards are those that "want" to be spread, and do not lose their edge from being spread.
While knowing that Generalissimus is hiding his daughter from the world will only get you (or at worst your family killed), knowing how to create easy energy from oil may get your whole civilisation killed. Some pieces of information lose their danger after being spread enough - governmental secrets stop being secrets, and thus their holders are no longer in danger. Others don't, like knowledge about how to effectively cause harm to others using a pipe, fertilizer and some nails. But when the information incentivises you to spread it AND it doesn't lose its bite, then it may be truly dangerous. I think that a good example is the idea of the infallible leader - spreading it is beneficial to a part of society, and it doesn't lose its power. Anomalous examples may be even more dangerous, using unusual modes of transmission and exerting influence upon reality !
The fourth category
While the previously shown information was applicable to all sorts of information hazards, the following section is about the most fantastical sort of infohazards.
While most anomalous information in fiction affects one's mind in unpredictable ways, that needs not nescesarily be the case! We can imagine tones that cause one to void their bowels (which in themselves would be cognitohazards, but the knowledge of their creation would be an infohazard), or virulent religions that force humans who learn of their doctrine to follow it (a social effect, instead of a mental one).
Here are some examples of effects they may hold:
- Forcing you to spread it, by maniacally saying or writing down phrases that hold them
- Causing damage to your psyche or your brain
- Opening you up to influences from other worlds
- Changing the way you see reality
- Causing a change in the laws of reality that surrounds its carriers
- Causing a change in physiological processes
What to remember (as a GM)
- Information hazards may be both anomalous or not, and both kinds may be used for great effect
- Information hazards should not invalidate player agency, and players should be able to either avoid them or to fight against them
- An Information hazard is often immediately useful (the bait) but leads to unwanted consequences (the hook)
- Information hazards are often dependant on your circumstances, unless a piece of information has anomalous effects.
Attribution and Further Reading (I do not condone all the things you may find on the other side of these links, but they may be useful)
https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/understanding-memetics https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/information-hazards https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/information-hazard