It is not often you see a local university host a major gaming tournament. Yet, the atrium of the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) is where the participants of EA Play 07 will converge tomorrow and Saturday as they battle tooth and nail as their virtual selves.

'But why not?' was the immediate response of Mr Lee Kwok Cheong, chief executive of SIM.

A veteran in the IT industry here, Mr Lee was chief executive officer of NCS, the leading systems integrator in Singapore, before joining SIM in August 2005.

His arrival has brought about many changes that are cementing the institution's relevance in the digital age.

Last year, SIM engaged popular pixel artwork firm eboy to create a 'pixel art' poster of the SIM campus.

SIM also created a mini-site called www.buildyourownfuture.info, which contains interactive information about the university and its academic programmes.

It's much like the game franchise The Sims, which happens to be from Electronic Arts (EA), the world's biggest game publisher.

The website also has an online game called Hooky where players, again visualised in pixel art form, need to collect assignments and books of knowledge. Players stand to win a game from EA once every fortnight.

SIM also advertises in Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Singapore, using interactive banner ads and games to attract students to visit the SIM web portal.

The online thrust was a huge success. In the first week of the Messenger campaign, SIM saw almost 30,000 click-throughs to the SIM site and over 12,000 people dabbled with the Hooky game.

Hosting EA Play 07 fits nicely into SIM's approach of reaching out to youths who are its potential students. After all, it's not easy to get potential students to visit university campuses.

Getting them to take part in a cyber-gaming competition provides a big carrot. At the same time, they can also check out the campus and the various courses.

During EA Play 07 tomorrow, SIM will be organising a seminar from 2pm to 5pm called The Business of Gaming to tell students more about the flourishing industry. It will be helmed by speakers from EA, mobile game developer Mikoishi, the Media Development Authority and SIM lecturers.

Games, said Mr Lee, can be a better method of teaching than standard classroom-based systems where rules and content are handed down in a linear fashion.

He said: 'In a computer game, you have to learn new rules, study the terrain, learn to use new weapons, explore the world. Things pop up unexpectedly in the game and you have to learn to deal with them on the fly.

'Games are actually just like the real world - you have to learn to adapt and survive along the way.'