Man hires 'assassin' to kill son's WoW avatar

Even paranoiacs have enemies - and if you find that strangers keep attacking you in online games, there just may be a reason.

According to reports, a man in China became so exasperated by the amount of time that his unemployed son was spending playing World of Warcraft that he decided to do something about it. It seems that the lad had quit a software development job after just three months, and was doing nothing to find another one.

Showing, perhaps, a rather limited understanding of how these things work, Mr Feng hoped that killing the 23-year-old's character off repeatedly would put him off playing altogether - and hired virtual assassins to do just that.

According to the Sanqing Daily, he managed to find killers who were at a much higher level than his son - despite all his hours of game play.

Unsurprisingly, even repeated deaths didn't put Xiao Feng off. They did, though, make him realize something was up, and one of the assassins eventually admitted that his father had taken out the virtual contract.

It could have been much worse. Less fortunate WoW addicts have, for example, been subjected to electrical shocks as a method of aversion therapy. And boot camps designed to tackle the problem are so harsh that inmates have been disabled or even killed.

Xaio Feng's still not putting his all into finding a new job. "I can play or I can not play, it doesn't bother me. I'm not looking for any job — I want to take some time to find one that suits me," he says.