HCM CITY — Online games have become a kind of drug for today’s children. More and more young people are getting pulled into a virtual world and are forgetting the responsibilities of real life, said Truong Quang Huan, former director of the Southern Culture and Sports Centre for Children and Youth under the Central Committee of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union.Faced with this alarming fact, the centre has launched a programme to help game addicts to spend more of their time engaged with the real world. The experimental programme runs for eight weeks at the HCM City-based centre.Public projectThe first counselling course for game addicts opened last November, with 60 attendees, according to Nguyen Thanh Nhan, the centre’s director and manager of the project."The course aims to help children to escape from the cyber-world and return to the real world, guiding children how to use the internet in a positive, helpful way," Nhan said.Nhan researched similar models in South Korea and China before designing the programme for Vietnamese children. However, the programme is definitely different from China’s and South Korea’s models.Game addicts can join the course with encouragement from their parents."If children are forced to attend the course, they may feel repressed," Nhan said."The course helps participants come back to real life by themselves. They will understand the meaning of life by making cakes for poor children.They must also take responsibility for washing their own clothes and taking care of themselves."Through activities, game addicts will gradually learn about the important things in life and will be encourages to change their behaviour, he said.Out of 60 registered applicants, the centre selects only 20 of the most serious addicts. Forty co-ordinators and psychologists run the course.The programme is made-up of three parts: feelings, physical training and social work.Everyday, the participants are asked to write out their true feelings on a piece of paper and put the paper into an "emotion box". Through this box, organisers are hoping to come up with effective psychological support to help game addicts."It is very difficult for children to immediately forget online games, so physical training and social activities are needed for them," Nhan said.During the course, participants have the chance to play sports together, like basketball, badminton and tennis.They will stay at the centre on weekends only and will be given time to do their schoolwork.Participants will still use computers to do group work. They will be challenged to carry out internet research and will then write reports based on information found."They will still surf the internet, but only for useful purposes," Nhan said.