The in-game assassin occupation is born

While video game addiction was once a uniquely American thing, times have changed, and kids in China are coming down with the illness, too. But they have their own way of handling things over there.

Xiao Feng, 23, believed himself to be the best online video game player around. For years he was playing games and neglecting school. His father was upset that he wasn’t even looking for a job. So, an in-game assassin-type guy was hired to go after his son to make him get bored with the games.

But where was his tiger mom?

Leroy Jenkins not a credible reference for politicians

Colleen Lachowicz is a democrat running for state senate in Waterville, Maine and she also happens to play a lot of World of Warcraft. As per Maine Republicans, this means that she is more than unfit for office, and as such, the Maine Republican Party has set up an entire website dedicated to digging up old forum posts made by Lachowicz.

“Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat candidate for Maine State Senate. In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.”

Yes, this is an actual website set up by the Maine Republican Party.

This whole situation is hilarious in the “you can’t believe it’s actually real” hilarious, kind of like in the beginning for the replacement refs for the NFL. To use the fact that she plays World of Warcraft as a political dig against her? It’d only be an understandable claim if the woman played Second Life.

Whatever, the princess is still single

Video games are getting more and more popular with the older crowd, even though they aren’t selling too hot these days. However, if you play those games long enough, you’ll eventually get to the real-life level where you have lost your spouse, according to a survey.

A study by Divorce Online (for all your divorce needs, especially when you start to regret marrying that video game character), more women are filing for divorce with complaints that their husbands spend too much time playing games, and, we assume, not enough time pleasing the ladies, if you know what we mean, gentlemen. (We mean folding the laundry.)

Boars, thrills in Germany

Slices of a boar that went buck-wild in a Hoehr-Grenzhausen butcher shop are up for sale. The boar pushed through the door of the shop, scared away a customer and inflicted 5000 Euros-worth of damage before having the bad form to bleed all over the floor.

As if that weren’t enough, Munich’s train station had a naked Australian infestation. The Sydney Streaker was foiled by a wet floor and slipped even though the stick figure on the caution sign was also not wearing any clothes. It just shows that you can’t dress up stupid.

It’s literally he said, she said

Angie L. Jenkins told a boy she played World of Warcraft with that she was 21. She’s actually 35. He told her he was 20. He was actually 15. Can we say romantic comedy?

After meeting in 2009, the pair developed a relationship that began online, moved to phone conversation and ultimately ended with a rendezvous in a car park in Amherst, New York, where the pair had sex, despite the unnamed boy being only 16 at the time. Jenkins has since been charged with “using the Internet to entice an underage person into sexual activity”, her undoing being that, during their earlier communications, the boy eventually and explicitly told her he was only 15, yet she kept up her pursuit, later telling a federal agent “it did not matter how old he was”. After all, love cares not for age nor legal status, right?

It’s not known at the moment just how Jenkins, a mother of five, was tracked down, but when the FBI got hold of her World of Warcraft username, all it took was an administrative subpoena to WoW developers Blizzard and they had her name and contact details. So, hey, you night elf and paladin in the corner over there-knock it off!

Rated ‘T’ for ‘Too Old’

If you’re bored with the World of Warcraft, then get ready for a new adventure on Planet Michael.

The planned online world will be based in a virtual Neverland that Tim Burton only brushed the dust off of with his Alice in Wonderland abortion and completely non-violent, using dance-based and musical problem solving.

The most remarkable part of the game is the character generation screen, where players can choose between 14 different noses and skin tints ranging from Motown Mocha to Anime Heroine.

Leroy Jenkins is more important than your marriage

Social sites and massively multiplayer online games aren’t just a great place to catch up with friends and be entertained, they’re also a great place to dig up dirt on a soon-to-be ex. Which, let’s face it, is one of the lamer reasons for why you’re being divorced.

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years.

Evidence like:

Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook’s Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.

So the next time you’re clanning for a new scepter of intelligence +25 in World of Warcraft, or logging 10 hours in Farmville, you might want to remember that someone could be watching … and taking a few notes.

It’s a breakout!

A group of adolescents interred at an internet addiction boot camp rose up against their oppressors last week, restraining their supervisor and fleeing the facility to taste sweet, sweet freedom. At least until their parents sent them back. Bummer.

China admits it has an internet addiction problem, which is the first step towards recovery. The popular second step right now is sending teens and adults addicted to the internet and online gaming to boot camps, where instructors use military techniques to try and instill a sense of discipline in folks who’d rather just play World of Warcraft.

A group of 14 addicts aged 15 to 22 interred at the Huai’an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre in China’s Jiangsu province decided they’d had enough last week, tying their supervisor to his bed and fleeing the grounds. Their freedom was short-lived, however. All 14 were caught by police after failing to pay the fare for a taxi they used in their daring escape. Thirteen of those have already been returned to the center by their parents. Someone sound The Price Is Right’s fail horn for me, would you please?

Real life has consequences? ZOMG!!!11

We’ll go ahead and get the pun out of the way: Oh WoW!

A World of Warcraft essentially slipped the human race the finger by getting involved in a drunken dispute with his mother, grabbing her hair, choking her, and headbutting a wall. Oh, and he also ended up getting shot in the head by his grandfather. All in one night. Impressive.

27-year-old James Swan, who lives with his mother, had been playing WoW and getting drunk before the fight began. That might mess up his ability to effectively use some of the macros, but hey, who are we to judge? Swan’s mother demanded that the man-child tone down the noise while he played his game at 10pm, a demand that Swan took umbrage with. So very much umbrage. NERD RAGE! Wacky hi-jinx ensued as the MMO player eventually grabbed his mother by the hair and flung her onto a bed. We can only hope there’s nothing Freudian about that action. He also did the same to his little brother, who had arrived to find out what the noise was about.

The mother ran to call the police, but Swan ripped the phone from the wall and proceeded to repeatedly headbutt the the spot where the phone once was, which is a good way to show the phone that it needs to learn its role in life and get back into the kitchen and make me a sammich.

Ahem.

He then began to choke his mother into near-unconsciousness, threatening to kill her, before the grandfather became involved. Swan threatened to kill him too, so the grandfather got his gun. The two men then wrestled over the gun, which went off and shot James Swan in the head. The bullet bounced off his skull and went through a window. Luckily for Swan, he was only wounded, and was arrested after refusing treatment at a hospital.

Words cannot begin to accurately articulate the glee and childish squealing that this story has given me.