Father Hires Virtual Hitmen To Assassinate Unemployed Son’s Avatar

A Chinese father took extreme measures to encourage his 23-year-old son to get a job. He hired virtual hitmen to murder his son’s online video game avatar in the hope he would quit playing and look for work instead.

The father, identified only as Mr. Feng on gaming blog Kotaku.com, said his son had grown obsessed with online role-playing games in high school—causing his grades to plummet. Although he graduated, Feng Jr. had been unable and unmotivated to hold a job. Even when he found work as a software developer, he left and was back to full-time gaming within a couple of months.

Mr. Feng decided to take matters into his own hands. He hired other players with a higher skill level than his son to kill Feng Jr.’s avatar every time he logged on to play. The father hoped his son would grow frustrated with his constant slaughter and quit gaming. The younger Feng eventually asked his assassins why they kept targeting him, however, and learned the truth.

“I can play or I can not play, it doesn’t bother me,” Feng Jr. reportedly told his father. “I’m not looking for any job—I want to take some time to find one that suits me.”

A professor of gambling studies at England’s Nottingham Trent University told the BBC that tactics such as Feng’s rarely work with gaming addicts.

“I don’t think these top-down approaches work,” Mark Griffiths told the BBC. “Most excessive game playing is usually a symptom of an underlying problem.”

Griffiths added that not all people who spend hours gaming have a problem.

“It’s not the time you spend doing something,” he said. “It’s the impact it has on your life.”

[Image via Shutterstock]