Subconscious choice

The government apparatus is asking the Prosecutor General’s Office and ministries to evaluate ideas for protecting children from the “negative” influence of video games. Among them is the creation of a list of approved games and a register of prohibited ones, as well as the requirement to pre-install domestic parental control programs on computers sold in the Russian Federation. Most of the ideas were put forward by the profile commission of the council of legislators at the Federal Assembly. Its participants are sure that popular video games contain “methods of influencing the consciousness and subconsciousness”, as well as “malicious programs and prohibited content.”

Kommersant has read a letter from Yevgeny Komar, director of the government’s information technology department, with a proposal to consider the idea of ​​creating a “catalog of approved online games.” The list can be created “similar to the RuStore application store.” On January 18, a letter was sent to a number of authorities, including the Ministry of Digital Development, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Education, they must give feedback by February 10. The aforementioned departments did not respond to Kommersant’s request, VK (the owner of RuStore) declined to comment.

The government apparatus also sent to the addressees the December decision of the commission of the council of legislators on information policy at the parliament, which formulated a number of proposals to protect children from the “negative impact of computer games.”

In particular, the commission proposed creating a register of prohibited games, obliging developers of online games to enter them “through Russian identification and authentication systems,” and also including Russian parental control systems in the list of programs that must be pre-installed on “computer equipment.”

The commission believes that popular video games (their names are not given) use “hidden inserts” and “methods of information dissemination that affect the consciousness and subconsciousness.” The government, on the recommendation of the commission, should consider the idea of ​​checking video game code for “malicious programs and prohibited content”; It is proposed to entrust this work to the Competence Center for Import Substitution in the Field of ICT (CCIKT). The telephone number of the head of the TsKICT, Ilya Massukh, was unavailable on the evening of January 26.

Drawing up black and white lists of games is a dead end, says Alexander Zhuravlev, head of the commission for the legal support of the digital economy of the Moscow branch of the AJUR. “This can be judged from the experience of the Chinese authorities, who for several years of strict censorship destroyed their own market with their own hands,” he believes.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the size of the Chinese gaming market in 2022 decreased by 10.3%, to $40.1 billion. . Now China has eased the measures.

If the banned video game registry initiative takes the form of a law, and sanctions include criminal prosecution, the official distribution of such games will stop, Kirill Lyakhmanov, chief legal adviser of the intellectual property practice at EBR law firm, notes: “This will most likely not affect the accessibility of such games: if If they can’t be purchased officially, then you’ll probably be able to download them from a torrent.”

The state, trying to gain tight control over video games, will achieve a radically opposite result, Alexander Malakhov, director of the Digital Development Center of the Center for Strategic Research, warns: “Creating a list of right and wrong games, introducing other restrictions will not force the audience to play Russian patriotic products, which, however, are still not yet”. He adds that in the long term, such an approach will only reduce the ability to control computer games and lead to money being washed out of the Russian gaming market, which will ultimately put an end to the creation of competitive gaming products. Before restricting foreign games, Mr. Malakhov adds, it is necessary to create “a national competitive market and the entire ecosystem around it.”

Yuri Litvinenko, Nikita Korolev