The expert reveals this issue in the context of the influence of gaming addiction on the manifestation of aggression in the real world - conflict as a reflection of a person’s internal vulnerable state.
Are computer games capable of influencing the subconscious of individuals, prompting them to commit a crime (an armed attack on citizens)?
Conflict specialist Gleb Trufanov believes that this question can be answered in two ways: YES they do influence and at the same time NO they do not influence.
First, we need to understand what a game is and what violence is in it. Yes, on the one hand, games with a lot of violence between people, such as shooters (Wolfenstein/Call of Duty), games about combat actions of the past have a clear tendency to have violence in their content.
Can they influence the formation of a tendency towards speciesism (violence of beings against each other within their own species) in an individual? - YES. How?
In the modern positive-functional conflictological tradition, it is customary to divide conflicts into two types: realistic (a conflict as a clash of mutually exclusive interests is aimed as a tool for achieving specific and objective goals in confrontation with an opponent) and unrealistic (a conflict is only a confrontation for the sake of confrontation without a specific objective goal, but only with the desire to release negative emotions and aggression on a random object, a random person, for example).
It should be noted that people who experience long-term depression, have an unstable psyche, quickly become irritated, etc. are often prone to unrealistic manifestations.
Also, crisis phenomena in the external environment in relation to the individual have a huge impact on the formation and aggravation of such characteristics of people.
Crises, troubles at work, alienation in personal life contribute to the acceleration of such moments, provoke secrecy, mistrust, hatred, and the accumulation of latent aggression.
Negative emotions accumulate over a long period of time, since such people, not always mentally ill, understand that society has a huge number of restrictions that are imposed on the outburst of emotions and their materialization in violent actions.
The worst thing in this case is alienation from the world; complete withdrawal into virtual reality can turn into tragedy.
Escaping from reality, immersion in the world of violence, building distorted ideas about the world in accordance with game realities, a different perception of the value of human life - all this results in pathology. But by the time they come out, the individual reaches the maximum boiling point and is no longer able to control himself, everything can end badly.
If these personality traits are combined with games involving great violence, then we can say that they are “fertile ground” for the development of violent potential in the individual.
If there are no such tendencies or a person has stable life positions and is generally successful in life and achieves his goals, then games cannot do any harm.
