The parental instinct is usually one of protection — gotta save the baby so my genes get passed on — but what if your son just refuses to stop playing video games online? Then it’s time to take him down in the virtual world, as one father in China decided to do when he hired online “assassins” to kill off his son’s avatars every time he logged on. Harsh, pops. Way harsh.

The BBC reports that the man didn’t like how much of his 23-year-old unemployed son’s life and energy were being poured into the gaming world. So he hired a bunch of other players to make that game experience less than a pleasant one.

Eventually his son figured it out after asking the players why he kept getting targeted. They were probably like, “stop whining about it.”

Amusing, perhaps, but is that kind of, you know, an unhealthy strategy? Ruin his fun to make him stop doing something he enjoys? Might as well smack his ice cream cone onto the ground when he’s about to take a bite.

“It’s not going to do much for family relations,” a gambling and addictions expert at Nottingham Trent University told the BBC. “I’ve never heard of that kind of intervention before, but I don’t think these top-down approaches work. Most excessive game playing is usually a symptom of an underlying problem.”

He adds that while sometimes parents worry about their children playing games too often, it’s not always an addiction, it’s just excessive.

A World of Warcraft expert also cited by the BBC wasn’t sold on the tactic either, for more practical reasons.

“Being killed by someone happens all the time,” she said. “People are just like that online.”

As for the son, it’s unclear if the intervention actually worked and he found the time to get a job, or just went back to the way things were before his father put a hit out on him.

Gamers hired by father to ‘kill’ son in online games [BBC]

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