Russia's attempts to remake its video game industry continue. This time, according to Kommersant (opens in new tab), the country's government has ordered the Attorney General's Office and ministries to protect Russian children from the "negative effects" of video games. As for "what negative effects," the commission investigating the issue under the Council of Deputies (opens in new tab) claims that many unnamed popular video games contain "hidden inserts" and "methods of disseminating information that influence a person's conscious and subconscious mind.

The commission has also announced that all games released in Russia with a pair of new registers of approved and banned games will first be declared "malware and banned content," and one called the country's Competence Center for Import Alternatives in the ICT Sphere (TsKIKT), which is by one of the "autonomous non-profit organizations," throwing up a system that needs to be checked for mind-altering subliminal insertions; TsKIKT's head, Ilya Masov, is a former Russian deputy telecommunications minister, and Kommersant could not reach him for comment.

There are also proposals to mandate pre-installed parental control apps on Russian PCs and to create a catalog of "approved online games" that would function like the country's RuStore (opens in new tab), replacing Google Play and App Store There are also But what these proposals are intended to prevent remains almost impossibly vague. But with Russia at war, under sanctions, and tightening information controls (opens in new tab), it is difficult to see the state as anything other than considering different ways to suppress opposition in the game.

These are only suggestions for now, but they do offer a glimpse into how the Russian government is thinking about the gaming industry in light of the exodus of Western technology out of the country. The recently expanded Russian law against "LGBT propaganda" (open in new tab) was incredibly vague on what exactly it wanted to crack down on, leaving plenty of room for the government to use that law as an excuse to stomp down on anything it doesn't like.

Still, there is an upside. Most people interviewed by the Kommersant newspaper thought the proposal was hopeless. Several experts the paper spoke to said that the measure, if adopted, would only stifle Russia's already floundering gaming sector. The director of the think tank's Center for Strategic Studies (open in new tab) said, "Making a list of right and wrong games will not make the audience play Russian patriotic products." Meanwhile, an intellectual property lawyer made the obvious point that players will torrent anything the government bans.

Whether the Russian government will heed this sage advice when considering the committee's proposal remains to be seen, but it seems determined to remake the country's gaming industry somehow. Whether it is a state-run game engine (opens in new tab) or a "Russian version of EA (opens in new tab)," the Russian state cannot help but think of ways to revitalize and control the gaming industry.