A Chinese father reportedly cooked up a novel, if roundabout, scheme for dissuading his unemployed son from wasting away his life playing online video games—hiring virtual “hitmen” to frag the malingerer’s character every time he logged on.

The story, related by Kotaku(Opens in a new window) by way of a Chinese-language gaming site(Opens in a new window), describes how a gentleman named Feng, at his wit’s end over his 23-year-old son’s refusal to get a job, managed to locate and hire some kick-ass players of Chinese online role-playing games to teach the young man a lesson.

Feng’s hired muscle would monitor various Chinese RPGs for the younger Feng’s arrival and attempt to kill off his character as quickly as possible. Apparently, the son fancied himself a “master” of his favorite games, according to Kotaku, but wasn’t much of a match for such concerted griefer effort on the part of the higher-level players the elder Feng hired.

The idea was that the son would get “bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job,” Kotaku reported. That, or he’d spend even more time in his virtual world trying to level up by killing boars(Opens in a new window) or something, right?

And in fact, the son, described by the blog as bringing home “terrible grades because of his gaming habit” and having failed to hang on at one software development job he landed, reportedly wound up getting the message. Sort of.

After figuring out what was going on, he told the elder Feng that when the right job came along, he’d maybe consider taking it, and in the meantime, his attitude toward playing video games was all, whatever, old man.

So, victory! Or something.

For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter(Opens in a new window).