The court banned forums about “alternate reality games”

The ban included pages on the gaming portals Goha, Primagames, Stopgame and Plarium, as well as on Dvacha and in the Alternative Reality Games group in Discord

A court in Adygea declared information about alternative reality games (ARGs) posted on five forums and in one group in the Discord messenger prohibited in Russia. “Verstka” found the relevant resolutions in the court file .

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According to the prosecutor's office, in such groups the Ukrainian special services “recruit terrorists”

The ban included pages on the gaming portals Goha, Primagames, Stopgame and Plarium, as well as on Dvacha and in the Alternative Reality Games group on Discord, which has more than 11.5 thousand members. The Adygea prosecutor’s office asked to do this, whose employees found forums in the “monitoring process” on preventing and countering terrorism.

“Currently, the quiet, but at the same time insidious work of the special services of Ukraine and a number of other states unfriendly to Russia to recruit minors and youth has unfolded,” the court ruling says.

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Young people are recruited into “extremist, terrorist” activities in sophisticated ways that are “improved almost every day,” the document notes.

One of these methods in the court decision is called games in alternative reality. At first, their participants “are given simple and seemingly harmless buildings,” for example, to take pictures next to the military registration and enlistment office. Thus, a participant in the game “unknowingly commits a crime,” after which they begin to manipulate him, and “tasks practically turn into sabotage.”

Prosecutors say most of those recruited are teenagers.

“The most vulnerable category of Internet users, on whom the intelligence services rely, are most often teenagers, taking into account their interests and flexible, unformed psyche, are susceptible to these types of provocations, since gaining trust and using their services is easy and simple,” the decision says.

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are interactive games that use the real world as the basis for a fictional story, players complete various tasks using websites, social networks, SMS, real objects and places. ARGs can be compared to role-playing games, which rely on players working together to solve riddles and puzzles.

Let us recall that earlier “Verstka” reported that Russian officials are fascinated by role-playing games : for some of them, games help them better understand politics, and some were even motivated to volunteer for “SVO”.

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