BEIJING – China has banned online games featuring sinister Dons and baseball bat-wielding Mafiosi, accusing software designers and manufacturers of promoting anti-social behavior.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice prohibiting such games, which have grown in popularity on the Internet recently.

The games “highlight the anti-social gangster behavior of beating, killing, looting, raping and cheating, and they promote bloodshed and violence,” the ministry said in a statement posted on its website.

They must be banned because they “gravely threaten and distort society’s efforts to build a lawful society and moral codes and will easily harm the youth,” the statement said, adding that authorities will strengthen their control over “cultural content” on the Internet.

Operators must immediately stop running or promoting the games, or providing links to them, according to the statement, which threatened “heavy” punishments, including taking a pipe to the legs of game providers. In the case of repeated offenders, a garrote will be applied.

Some companies have already started internal investigations and removed some games from their Web sites.

Crime Interactive, which creates and markets such popular games as Extreme Mobsters, Midnight Mafia and MobLife, said it will discontinue legal sales in China, but will continue to sell through its network of Triad members.

Midnight Mafia allows players to become a boss of a crime gang. They have the choice to collect money from their casinos, whorehouses, loan sharks and gambling dens, according to Crime Interactive CEO Luigi Belladonna.

China has the world’s largest online population, with 338 million Internet users, making authorities nervous about the impact that cyberspace may have on the methods used to fight to the top.

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