VietNamNet Bridge - After five months of tightening control over online games, HCM City authorities have banned 20 games, said an official during yesterday’s conference on online games management.

Most of the suspended games are violent, including three most popular gun games -- Sudden Attack, Special Force and Cross Fire -- provided by Vinagame, FPT and VTC Intercom, respectively.

These games had been licensed by the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC), said Le Manh Ha, director of HCMC Information and Communication Department.

The Department has requested nine online game operators and providers to remove violent assault and combat from 29 of their kungfu games. So far, Saigontel and Netgame have complied in 6 games while FPT, VTC and Asiasoft have pledged to do the same for 14 games prior to April 1, 2011, he said.

The director also said the department would take tough action against Vinagame since the company had yet to delete violent scenes from eight of its games.

Regarding online games that can be accessed from overseas servers, Ha said he had requested Internet service providers to take measures to prevent the penetration of unlicensed games.

The department is preparing a list of unlicensed online games and will ask online games providers not to provide those games to users, he told the conference.

To minimize the negative effects of online games on users, especially students, a representative of District 2’s Cultural and Information Office proposed that online games be restricted from 6 pm to 7 am, the time when parents can exercise effective control over their children’s activities.

Impediments that only the Ministry can overcome

The city department has asked online game companies to close their services to 352 Internet cafes located within 200 meters of schools, said Ha. However, several district officials at the conference said many of those cyber cafes still offered online games to their clients.

It is not legally allowed to turn down applications for setting up Internet cafes near schools, said Nguyen Ngoc Hung, head of the Cultural and Information Office of Tan Phu District. “All we can do is to put on the business license we granted, in parenthesis, ‘not allowed to provide online games’”.

Officials from the Cultural and Information Office of other districts confirmed the difficulty of managing internet cafes, saying they could only issue warnings or penalties to violators but could not revoke their business licenses.

To eliminate violent online games, HCMC’s Department has proposed the Ministry of Information and Communication establish clear criteria for assessment of violence levels of online games and conduct an overhaul of all the licensed games, but the ministry has yet to respond to the proposal, Ha said.

In addition, the department also recommended that online game companies control the ages of game users and shut down online-gaming servers from 10 pm to 8 am, but the ministry did not reply to that either, he said.

The Ministry has taken some measures to improve management over online games, but it has yet to do what is most essential: to eliminate violent online games, Ha told Tuoi Tre. “The ministry has the full authority and ability to do this,” he added.

Source: Tuoi Tre