Mother Hacks Son’s Online Gaming Profiles; Deletes Them to Make Him Study

In a story likely to give every serious online gamer nightmares for years to come, it appears that at least one “concerned mother” may have finally found a way to get her high school age son to stop playing video games and focus on his homework. At least, if you consider the loss of a year’s worth of time spent building gaming achievements to be an acceptable loss in the battle for your child’s education.

The story comes from China, where one frustrated mom in Wuhan City took it upon herself to stop her son playing video games, fearing for the future of his studies. As one might expect, her initial recourse was to uninstall the games from her son’s hard drive, thinking this would remove his ability to access them. However, cloud computing intervened and naturally enough, her son was able to reinstall his games and access his data on those games’ remote servers. Did this deter his mother? No. She carried on a silent battle of wills against her son by continually uninstalling his games for eighteen months trying to stop him.

But, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, then this mother was decidedly not insane. After eighteen months she recognized that her tactics were simply not working and that more drastic measures would have to be taken.

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What happened next, according to Rocket News 24, is pure gamer nightmare fuel (emphasis theirs):

"So the mother decided to step up her anti-gaming game by getting her hands on a hacking tool, which she used to obtain her son’s on-line gaming passwords. With the keys to his virtual world in hand, she logged into his accounts and promptly deleted them, erasing all trace of her son’s existence in the game and turning his achievements naught to digital dust.When the son discovered what she’d done, he was furious, and refused to go to school the next morning. Eventually, his teacher had to intervene, encouraging the youth to come to class, where he still appeared visibly upset. “I put more than a year of effort and allowance into those games, and now it’s all been wasted!” he lamented."

Somehow, based on previous gamers’ reactions to similar stories, one doubts that “furious” does this unfortunate young man’s reaction justice. See also:

No information yet as to whether the young man’s grades have ticked up, but somehow, one doubts that he’s going to forget this. More troubling still, however, is the fact that tools that can be used to hack players’ accounts are so pervasively available that even a housewife working with China’s censored internet could figure out how to get one. Hide your characters; hide your items.