People's Daily launched an online game to fight corruption. Photo: screenshot

New | People's Daily online game lets users zap China's corrupt officials

The Communist Party mouthpiece launched on Thursday an HTML-based game called "Hit the Greedy and Corrupted"

Published: 1:45pm, 10 Jan 2014

People's Daily, despite its tedious ramblings and propagandist leanings, decided to be fun and playful this week in a bid to fight corruption.

The social media arm of the Communist Party mouthpiece, Renmin Weibo, launched on Thursday an HTML-based game called Hit the Greedy and Corrupt.

"Cracking down on corruption is not a game," read its introduction on Weibo, "But playing games could help drive this idea home."

Players are rewarded points by promptly "electrocuting" corrupt officials whenever they pop up on the screen. Users lose points for mistakenly hitting a police officer. The speed of the game picks up as players hit more "evil" officials.

"There were so many corrupt men popping up so fast in the end -- it's simply impossible to kill them all," a microblogger joked. "Is this considered defamation against the party?"

"What's the point of the game? Is this meant to distract our attention from our real problems?," another microblogger wrote.

Last year, China's nationalist paper, the Global Times, launched an online game called Recover the Diaoyu Islands. It takes visitors on a People's Liberation Army vessel on a mission to reassert Chinese sovereignty over the island chain also claimed by Japan.

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