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Bid for healthy video games
The Shanghai Education Commission will launch a public bidding process for healthy computer games, which will be used in local elementary schools to enrich students' extracurricular life. First initiated last year, the bidding will be open to all domestic computer game designers, and will seek games that are suitable for the healthy development of elementary school students. The games could be online intelligence contests or single-player ones. But violence and pornography related contents are strictly prohibited, commission officials stressed. "We really want to call upon society to design some attractive, exciting games that can embrace our upward national spirit and be useful for our local elementary students as well," said Zhou Hong, a commission official. She added that some top computer game designers, such as Shanda Interactive Entertainment Co Ltd, have already been invited to attend the bidding. Games or programs that win the bid will be introduced in 1,500 primary and secondary schools as part of a nationwide "Connecting campuses with Internet" project. The companies will still retain the chosen games' copyrights and are free to sell them on the market, officials said. Launched in 2000, the Internet project, initiated by the Ministry of Education, requires all schools in the country's eastern cities to have access to the Internet on campus by 2005. Shanghai finished setting up a computer network in all local elementary schools last year and plans to invest 1 million yuan (US$120,481) in buying online entertainment programs for students - such as computer games or animations. However, only a small fraction of the large investment budget has been spent so far since almost none of the computer games in the market currently cater expressly to students, commission officials said. "Most of the current games are adult-oriented, and related to violence or pornography to some extent," Zhou Chunsheng, a sociologist with Shanghai Teachers University, said. "That will mislead young students." A nationwide survey last year indicated that about 55 percent of computer game players were young students. The percentage is higher in the city, officials said.
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