The Chinese Army has transformed its idea and utilized online games to improve the quality of military training. In an armored regiment of Shenyang military area, 76 online game master-hands have successively become the best in tactical trainings.

Last year, this regiment found in a survey that 67 percent of the new recruits liked to surf the internet before joining the army. They had played such online games as CS and Beach Head and were quite familiar with tactics including military deployment, firepower arrangement and battlefield forming in the games.

Therefore, the regiment specially equipped itself with online game servers. After studying for a period of time, the regiment issued the "online game management rules" as the criterion for officers and soldiers playing online games. Besides, it established a simulated tactical confrontation training platform on the basis of military games and periodically conducted such activities as internet tactical arena.

One year later, most of these online game master-hands have become backbone soldiers in tactical trainings, and the military training quality has been effectively elevated.

(China News Service March 31, 2006)