Материал: disser_arhipov

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The hypothesis about game turn can be shaped already in connection with the growth and significance of the game industry market from the standpoint of economy.195 In culture, it is determined by the following context. As noted by V.V. Savchuk and applied to the games as a whole,

«[a]fter J. Huizinga, L. Wittgenstein and R. Caillois, it is presumptuous to speak seriously about understanding the essence of the game as an ontological condition of culture, functions, performed by it, its types, without taking into account the results of their research. Modern computer games or online games, about which the classics – for more than understandable reasons – could not write, and from those who write nowadays are dominated by the condemnation of teachers, journalists, psychologists, doctors, are still a blind spot of humanitarian research. Nevertheless, they are an accurate measurement of the

“temperature” of public expectations, the intensity of contradictions, and the social disharmony of rather visible strata of society (emphasis added – V.A.)».196

It should be noted that the present study is not devoted to the moral assessment of computer games, as well as legal prohibitions and restrictions on such games by themselves (except for some special examples from empirical material), so specifically for law the problem of negative perception of the research aimed at studying computer games as a subject of regulation and legal relations arising in relation to them, is not worth in principle. Indeed, if legal science were not engaged in the analysis of legal regulation and other legal problems of all those phenomena that are “condemned” by teachers, journalists, psychologists and doctors (for the sake of fairness, we note that not all recent studies indicate the negative role of computer games – a number of recent studies suggest otherwise), the number of scientific works on law would be reduced by half, and criminal law and criminological studies could be basically thrown aside for the unwanted.

However, back to the main topic. The following observation is important for us:

195Arkhipov V.V. Intellectual Property in the Video Game Industry: Problems of Theory and Practice (in Russian) // Zakon. – Moscow, 2015. – No. 11. – P. 62.

196Savchuk V.V. Mediaphilosophy – Rush of the Reality. P. 135.

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«Computer games – the result of a mutation at the end of XX century game as such. They include all types of games highlighted by Caillois: Agôn (competitive games), Aléa (chance games, “gambling”), Mimicry (imitation games) and Ilinx (ecstatic games). Neither the uninhibited pre-Christian antiquity, nor the Middle Ages with their conventional shyness, nor the Renaissance with its heroic affirmation of humanism, nor the fascination of the mind the New Time, with the pathos of weighing everything on his scales, could not ban gambling».197

We emphasize that “gambling” in terms of game and media research and “gambling” as a criterion of legally restricted or prohibited games are different, though related terms. Typically, the law restricts strictly defined categories of games on the grounds of “gambling” and the term specifically restricts them for enforcement purposes. The principles of this restriction are explained elsewhere. For the time being, computer games are an interesting and representative object of research, not only because they bring together all the “old” games, but also because they reflect the cultural changes that accompany digitalization, despite some residual marginalization, are at the core of contemporary information culture and, in addition, they combine different areas of art.

In general, cultural research scholars note that

«[a] radical change in the practices of socialization, identification, communication allows us to speak about significant socio-cultural changes, and the development and implementation of new technologies have a direct impact on society and culture as a whole. Digitalization, on the one hand, acts as a unifying and integrating beginning, and, on the other hand, it causes even greater rifts in society and generates new forms of inequality and segregation».198

The author of this observation, A.A. Lisenkova, among the new socio-cultural challenges of the modern era, notes, among other things, “the emergence of network multipersonalities: (I-as-one ceases to exist, multiuser worlds and fandom communities are created). It involves the transformation of the methods of socialization and identification

197Ibid. PP. 136–137.

198Lisenkova A.A. Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Age: the Sociocultural Aspect // Liberal Arts in Russia. 2018. Vol. 7. No. 3. – P. 217.

“transformation of language practices: the digital generation speaks another language, the geek language, using foreign words with other meanings everywhere. These processes cause cultural changes and shifts in meaning”.200

As noted by O.Y. Volkov and Y.K. Volkov,

«…agreeing with the subjective-objective and interpretation of the communicative action, it is impossible not to mention its intersubjective continuation. The point is that in the system of subject-object relations mediated by the object, the understanding or misunderstanding of the meaning and meaning of alienated knowledge is connected with the process of a new sense of creation and subjectivization of the objective [3, p. 263]. It is this kind of dialogical and communicative semiotic interpretation of information that became the basis for the creation of personal devices that use information technology for communication, which is the main system resource of the information society».201

Noting the role and importance of information technologies in the life of modern society, the authors emphasize that

«…information technologies in a modern society are implemented in all major spheres of human life, including the most complex and large-scale area identified in the concept of culture. Moreover, the degree of influence of information technologies on the sphere of modern culture has turned out to be so significant that it has even led to the emergence of a special information culture»202.

And the authors have noticed that

«…along with other forming features of the information society culture (clipping, fragmentality, modularity, representativeness, metaphoricality, multiple meanings, use of

199Ibid. P. 220.

200Ibid.

201Volkov O.Yu.; Volkov Yu.K. Computer Game as the Technological and Aesthetic Phenomenon of the Information Society’s Culture [Electronic resource] // Privolzhsky Scientific Bulletin. 2015. No. 6–3 (46). P. 79–82. – URL: http://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/kompyuternaya–igra–kak–tehnologicheskiy–i–esteticheskiy–fenomen–kultury– informatsionnogo–obschestva (accessed: 01.10.2017). – P. 80.

202Ibid.

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graphics, etc.), its qualitatively new state is the presence of a mature form of the so-called “screen culture”, most often defined as virtual reality (from Latin virtualis – possible)».203

As the researchers continue their reasoning, they are pointing out that

«…the phenomenon of computer games occupies a special place in the information cultural space of modern society», and conclude that «...remaining in the form of a modern technological device, in its aesthetic essence, computer games appear in the culture of the information society as a complex synthetic analogue of game art and artistic creation, the unity of creativity and semantics, simultaneously containing the “unconsciously-artistic” and consciously-willed elements of activity, evaluation and understanding»204.

In other words, in general, at the current stage of development of the information society is formed such an information culture, one of the significant aesthetic phenomena of which are computer games. However, this is only one of the possible manifestations of this aspect of development.

As V.V. Savchuk emphasizes,

«[w]ith the development of computer technology and virtual reality technologies, computer games have also been improved. The changes affected not only the form of expression – graphics, scenes, images – but also the internal structures of computer games, which have become more complex subject and ideology. This has led to the fact that the composition of the players has changed. If earlier, at the dawn of computerization, computer games were played mainly by children and teenagers, then with the spread of computer technology and the subsequent development of virtual games, their consumer became more mature (he grew up with the development and improvement of the games themselves) and educated. As they are accepted undoubtedly, and their creation and development are subsidized by educational games, trainings, simulators of complex machines and means of warfare... One of the private, but still important consequences is to expose the myth of computer games as a phenomenon of grass-roots culture characteristic of childhood or infantile personalities; games are not marginal, they are an equally important element of culture, as well as psychological, sports,

artistic, love games. At the same time, traditional games increasingly resort to the mediation of new media».205

203Ibid. P. 80 – 81.

204Ibid.

205Savchuk V.V. Mediaphilosophy – Rush of the Reality. PP. 139–140.

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Thus, the game turn is expressed in the social legitimization of computer games as a subject of research in social and humanitarian scientific discourse in particular, and in general – in the legitimization of computer games in culture.206 In addition, from the systematic understanding of the sources presented in this paragraph, one more important conclusion follows: the games are not only becoming a form of mass, total art, which cannot be ignored, but also culture itself is “gamified”.207 In our view, the latter is critically important for understanding the focus of the study, which focuses on legal ways of overcoming the conflict between serious and non-serious, common sense and absurdity. No comprehensive and widely accepted terminological apparatus has been developed to describe what is happening in the context of a game turn of events and trends. At the same time, it is clear that, at least by a quantitative measure and in the legally significant context, the games of the past are fundamentally different in scale from modern examples: before, the games and the field of the minor were not so widespread and “dissolved” in everyday life that they can be explained economically (the emergence of more “free time”), psychologically (on the contrary, the appeal to entertainment in times of crisis) and, apparently, technologically (the transfer of games to the widespread consumer technological landscape). Modern research emphasizes that virtual reality, while at first glance changing only the “form of presentation of the game action”, nevertheless “leads to a qualitatively different involvement of the player in the game and dictates its own peculiarities of gaming behavior and perception”.208 Medial turn offers again to pay attention to the phenomenon of the game as such. M.M. Bakhtin demonstrated that “the fundamental difference between art and game is that game is fundamentally absent of

206Especially it is necessary to underline the fact of recognition of computer sport as an official kind of sport in some countries, first of all – in the Russian Federation, where it was made for the first time in history. For more details see: Arkhipov V.V. eSports Law: Fact or Fiction? // Zakon. 2018. No. 5. P. 80–92.

207“Gamification” is the original English term. In Russian version of this text it is adapted, and not transliterated (“игрофикация” instead of “геймификация”), for euphony and exclusion of non-target connotations.

208Tendryakova M.V. Old and New Faces of the Game: Game Specifics of Virtual Space // Cultural-Historical Psychology. – 2008. – № 2. – P. 60.