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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.

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viewers and authors. The game does not need them, it will be a game without them. The player himself does not see his game as a whole, does not have its holistic aesthetic image. A work of art always depicts something, and the game does not depict anything, but only imagines”.209 Accordingly, the game becomes an art, “just as dramatic action”, when “an indifferent participant – the viewer” appears,210 which is what we see in modern sociocultural practices surrounding computer games. At the same time, “game and art... have in common that they are not real life. However, their “invalidity” is different: the game imagines life and art depicts it”.211 We emphasize that in the conditions of digital turn such a line between the imagination and the depiction is erased. Moreover, both in the case of the imagination and in the case of the depiction, we see the presence of a simulation in a special sense of this study. Note, however, that for culturology and its related disciplines, the question of whether game practices have undergone qualitative changes in the context of the medial turn is different from the question of whether any changes in the nature of the practice itself, which are characteristic of such conditions and which are related to play in human society, have consequences for law. In the context of this study, the latter question is related to the notion of simulation as a phenomenon that excludes the possibility of a reasonable application of law. In any case, the game turn in culture is certainly not only and not so much related to computer games themselves, mediated by technological virtual reality, but to the overall understanding of culture from the game point of view – with this approach, M.M. Bakhtin’s own works should be regarded as evidence of the game turn in the XXth century.

In light of these considerations, the statements and leaders of the industry itself are very much in character. In the preface to the book by R. Koster, a key developer of

209Demidov A.B. Phenomena of Human Existence. Minsk, 1999 [Electronic resource] / PSYLIB. - [Site]. - URL: http://psylib.org.ua/books/demid01/txt04.htm (accessed: 09.09.2019).

210See: Bakhtin M.M. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity // Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of Verbal Creativity. M.: Publishing house “Art”, 1979. – PP. 67–68.

211Demidov A.B. Phenomena of Human Existence. Minsk, 1999 [Electronic resource] / PSYLIB. - [Site]. - URL: http://psylib.org.ua/books/demid01/txt04.htm (accessed: 09.09.2019).

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multiplayer online role-playing game Ultima Online, another authoritative game-designer Will Wright212 writes:

«For the first few decades of interactive game design we were able to blithely ignore many of the larger meta-questions surrounding our craft while we slowly, painfully learned to walk. Now for the first time we are starting to see serious interest in what we do from the academic side. This is forcing those of us in the games industry to stop and consider, “What is this new medium that we’re working in?” The academic interest seems twofold: First is the recognition that video games probably represent an emerging new media, a new design field, and possibly a new art form. All of these are worthy of study. Second, there are an increasing number of motivated students that grew up playing these games and now find themselves inspired to work in the field one day… Games (both video and traditional) are tricky to study because they are so multidimensional. There are so many different ways you can approach them. The design and production of games involves aspects of cognitive psychology, computer science, environmental design, and storytelling just to name a few. To really understand what games are, you need to see them from all these points of view».213

With the spread of computer games, it has become necessary to analyze them not only from the point of view of the craft (or sometimes art) of game development, but also as an artifact of social reality, and as a subject of legal regulation in the broad sense of the word – the analysis of computer games from the point of view of intellectual property rights, rather, belongs to the first direction. We are more interested in the relationship between users mediated by computer games and in defining the fine line where the relationship becomes so real and serious that the law can no longer ignore it.

The relevance and representativeness of computer games and the significance of the game rotation itself are not only related to the “light side” of the methodological potential of the study of game relations as such. V.V. Savchuk, coming very close to the legal plane, notes that,

212 Will Wright (born in 1960) is a co-founder of Maxis, who later worked for Electronic Arts, a developer of the famous SimCity games, The Sims and others. “Before Wright, computer simulation was the domain of the military, scientific research, and academics. He brought it to everyone”. See: Lifetime Achievement [Electronic resource] // PC Magazine. December 22, 2004. – [Site]. – URL: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1744159,00.asp (accessed: 23.01.2019); Will Wright [Electronic resource] // MobyGames. – [Site]. – URL: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,4217/ (accessed: 23.01.2019).

213 Koster R. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (in Russian). Moscow: DMK Press, 2018.. – PP. x-xi.

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«…in view of the fact that computer games are becoming increasingly popular and improved, the latter require close attention and monitoring, including monitoring of the emergence of pornography and the propaganda of drugs and racial and ethnic hatred, which are the flip side of the media landscape in general and computer games in particular. This phenomenon is giving rise to new phenomena, penetrating into the cinema, the media and education (training and education of specialists, etc.). One should not forget such an important aspect as the possibility of using computer games as a means of manipulating public consciousness. The ability to make transformations in reality far exceeds the awareness of theorists and game practitioners. The game “plays a role” as a catalyst for social cohesion and regulates its moral and ethical behavior. It is necessary to notice, for example, the need to deconstruct the methods of ideological influence on the formation of the American version of the Second World War, the attitude towards Islamic countries, Russia, the third world in specific games».214

It should be noted that this observation already contains a potential “clue” to the direction in which to look for the cases in which relations related to the content of computer games, the formation of such content, as well as relations within the virtual reality may suddenly become subject to legal regulation. This quote also brings us back to the question of the limits of law, not only in the special semantic sense that is being developed within the scope of this work, but also in part of the question on “moral limits of law” which will be discussed in § 1 Chapter 2.

In a conversation about the “dark side” of contemporary socio-cultural transformation, the following observation may provide some (and perhaps ironic) explanation of the perspective of the actual socio-cultural context – that of the information society of the postmodern era – which is interesting in the present work. Further mentioned in the pages of this study (in § 1 of Chapter 2) by J. Feinberg in the book “Offense to Others”215 offered a thought experiment to the reader. The point of the experiment is that you are late for an important meeting, get on the bus (and so there is a closed space) and

214Savchuk V.V. Mediaphilosophy – Rush of the Reality. P. 141.

215An exact translation of “offense” as a concept different from the infringement itself and from “harm” in the Mill’s sense is hardly possible into Russian. J. Feinberg, we believe, means something that combines abuse, insult and delinquency at the same time. But much less intense than the “harm” of J. Mill.

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before your eyes other passengers begin to carry out actions that do not correspond to the notion of harm in the terminology of J. Mill, the author of the fundamental postulates for the moral theories of the Western world, but which you just obviously do not like. Moreover, you do not like it so much that you will be ready to consider the possibility of establishing a criminal law restriction on such actions.

H. Dalton, a strict reviewer for J. Feinberg’s book and author of a review entitled «“Disgust” and Punishment»,216 suggested certain examples from which we will select few of those where, given the high standards of the Russian academic style, we will probably not risk completely citing any of them, limiting ourselves to just a general abstract description, and will further emphasize that the purpose of referring to these examples in this work is in no way to offend anybody’s feelings. The most “vivid” examples of J. Feinberg begin with the sixth story, in which you witness the absorption of your neighbors’ “food”, which is conventionally disgusting. In the seventh, lunch grows into a feast with Roman proportions, but with modification: neighbors absorb not only fresh food, but also partly digested. In the eighth one, there is a variety of products of people’s life activity absorbed by neighbors. In the eleventh story to the opposite of you (it is assumed that you are a good Christian) sits a young man in a T-shirt, with an evil caricature of the central personality of the doctrine. In the twenty-third, an act of zoophilia is committed next to you.217 The meaning of J. Feinberg’s thought experiment is to convince the reader by means of a lively emotional reaction that the Millevian principle of harm is not the only reason for possible state coercion. In the author’s opinion, a civilized society should protect its members, including by interfering with the freedom of others, not only from harm per se, but also from “offense”,218 which cannot be unequivocally

216Dalton H.L. “Disgust” and Punishment // The Yale Law Journal. – 1986-1987. – Vol. 96. – PP. 881–913.

217Ibid. P. 884.

218There were some difficulties in translation into Russian here, because in the original version the author operates with subtle semantic differences in individual English words, which correspond to the varying degrees of public danger of crime.

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interpreted as harm. However, this kind of reasoning is relevant primarily for Western moral and philosophical discourse, which is largely based on the utilitarian tradition and inevitably includes criticism or rethinking of J. Mill’s writings in virtually any discussion of the moral dimensions of law.

In the context of this paragraph of this study on the transformation of society in today’s environment, we are interested in something else – in addition to the previously discussed examples related to the emergence of new phenomena and practices of information culture related to digital technologies directly, such as multiplayer computer games and computer sports, there are some cultural practices, presumably not without elements of the impact of the same processes of liberalization of production and dissemination of information. Whether or not there is such an impact is a separate subject of sociology and cultural studies, but we can in any case postulate the correlation of these processes, as this is a matter of fact. The main perspective for this study is that some of the abstract examples of abusive behavior described above by J. Feinberg, proposed by the author more as a product of the imagination, have found their indirect expression in actionism in recent decades,219 often interpreted as art-related practice.220 This cultural

219 In the present study, the term “actionism” is used in a narrow sense, in which it describes the activities of P. Pavlensky and Pussy Riot, with an obligatory element of interaction with socially significant subjects of social relations and, as a consequence, with the inevitable transition of communication into the legal plane. There are also alternative, broader interpretations. As V.O. Petrov notes, for example, “the aim of the authors of the actions, including musical ones, is to create artistic samples (not fully fixed in the space of opuses), which are the free realization of a concrete idea. Sometimes it turned out that the only significant task of the artists and all the people who took part in the realization of the action was the generation of ideas and concepts. The author's text is a kind of ‘instructions for use’. It is implemented in the musical art by performers. Conceptual objects (in most cases, with an abundance of author’s comments) in a musical work can be graphs, schemes, diagrams, formulas, verbal explanations and drawings, as well as objects that do not have a certain functional purpose. In a word, as a rule, it turned out to be a stratum of ideas that does not have a concrete implementation. Sometimes, part of the verbal expression of the idea of the action was also an indication of the environment in which the conceptual object itself could be demonstrated. Actions could be held everywhere - on the street, on the road, in the field, in the woods, near the mountain, in a particular locality, gallery, concert hall. The conceptual idea of the author is rather chaotic, while the task of the performers is to bring the chaos into harmony”. See: 119. Petrov O.V. Actionism and Its Manifestation in the Vocal–Instrumental Compositions of John Cage // Problems of Science. 2018. No. 5 (125). P. 103–104. This interpretation focuses on the spontaneous transmission of the idea, but does not go any further in restricting the term “actionism” in the case of direct introduction of the aesthetic object of “external referents of value” into the material (in the terminology of S. Abrutyn).

220 It should be noted at once that it is possible to refer actionism to art in usual, classical interpretations of the latter only if we consider both terms in the key of Wittgenstein’s language games, according to which there is seldom a direct and hierarchical logical connection between the meanings of words in the real practice of the language, but there is more frequent