Last week, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Vladimir Reinhardt proposed banning the video game Minecraft: “You understand, these games should be banned in general, and these sites. And then there won’t be this hyperactivity. Because what is this Minecraft game promoting? It’s as simple as violence.” Then the AP clarified that the colleague, apparently, was confused and it was not about Minecraft, but about Warcraft. Nevertheless, the proposal apparently fell on fertile ground: the deputy, according to the words of his assistant, began to receive numerous calls from concerned parents who supported his initiative. The concerns of parents are quite understandable; the connection between computer games and violence seems to many to be something obvious at the level of common sense. However, are these fears justified from the point of view of modern criminology?

Is it even possible to teach criminal behavior to someone? Apparently, yes, because any complex forms of behavior are the result of learning. Do we adopt criminal behavior unconsciously, for example, by consuming media content? The question, as usual, is tricky, since a positive answer would lead to far-reaching conclusions. For example, to such that right now millions of players in GTA (a criminal simulator game) are undergoing criminal socialization, the TV series “Brigade” and the film “Boomer” are raising a whole generation of bandits, and many chemistry teachers after the TV series Breaking Bad will begin producing methamphetamine. However, crime around the world, including in Russia, has been falling for the second decade, despite the increase in video games, TV shows and films depicting violence.

Although video games have been with us for more than 40 years, massive public and academic interest in the problem of computer games and violence arose after a very specific event - the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Teenage criminals Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, among other things, were addicted to creating levels in the 3D shooter Doom. Perhaps for training purposes, some of these levels reproduced the internal structure of the school that the teenagers eventually attacked.

Although the mass consciousness and even the academic community have clearly seen the problem in violent computer games for some time, the situation is not so obvious. One of the leaders of the movement against computer games, psychological scientist and public intellectual Craig Anderson, says that the connection is obvious and beyond doubt. He is opposed by another psychologist, Christopher Fergusson, who is trying to show that Anderson’s research is methodologically flawed, and those that were carried out according to all the rules not only do not find a positive connection between the tendency to commit crimes, but, on the contrary, find a negative one.

As sometimes happens in scientific disputes, there are accusations of bias on both sides. And while the academic and public debate is still ongoing, the scales are tipping in Fergusson's favor. Why? Here, firstly, fresh criminological research comes to help in resolving the dispute between psychologists. Studies that tested the relationship between sales, release dates of “violent computer games” (primarily 3D shooters) and search queries for them not only did not find a statistically significant positive relationship between violent crime and all of the above, but also demonstrated that the release of such games help reduce crime. It is quite possible that computer games help relieve tension and provide release to those very aggressive impulses that they are so often accused of causing.

Secondly, we can turn to the results of studies of the connection between violence and the long-standing enemies of public morality - cinema and television. These were mostly experimental studies conducted by psychologists in the late 1960s. – early 1970s Subjects were shown acts of aggression and then tested to see how much of a tendency they found to engage in such behavior. Example: Subjects A and B can give each other a weak electric shock. A and B are watching a film showing scenes of violence. The experimenter then asks one of the subjects to shock the other. The second subject has a choice: take revenge on the offender by delivering an electric shock back, or forgive him. The first studies conducted in this vein found a consistent positive relationship between the demonstration of aggression and the tendency towards it. But then it turned out that the so-called experimenter effect took place - the very presence of a scientist expecting a certain result pushed people to behave more aggressively, it seemed to them that such behavior was approved. Thus, no clear conclusions could be drawn.

Quasi-experimental studies of the connection between television and violent crime are also interesting. Television in the United States (where the lion's share of criminological research is based on crime data) was introduced in stages, with television already operating in some parts of the country and not yet in others. This process lasted more than two and a half post-war decades and was accompanied by an equally sharp increase in crime from the early 1960s. It turned out that crime in the regions where television broadcasting began actually grew, although not violent crime, but property crime. One explanation was that the demonstration of the sweet life made people want to improve their own financial situation. Another explanation suggested that television penetration correlated with wealth, and the more things people had, the more likely they were to be stolen.

Can the conventional “Brigade”, “Boomer” or, say, GTA give rise to new criminals? Research and the surrounding reality, in which crime continues to decline year after year, show that most likely not. It is even more unlikely that future offenders can be trained by the Minecraft construction game, since this game is safer than its counterparts in the real world - you definitely won’t be choking on virtual small parts.

The author is a junior researcher at the Institute of Law Enforcement Problems at the European University in St. Petersburg

Do games teach bad things?