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Let's see... I'm in the middle of reading Reamde by Neal Stephenson, which involves (amongst a lot of other things) a Russian hitman going after Chinese gamers, so my head might be a little too into this... The trick with video game movies is that it's not interesting to watch people use computers or play video games. Or perhaps we just haven't stumbled upon the right way to do it yet. And, to me at least, by the time the movie's released any current MMORPG will be vastly outdated, so you'd have to invent one, and that probably means a lot of CGI animation if your movie is taking place in there. And you have two ways to go about that, either we see the screen that the character sees, or we put that person IN the video game like in "Ender's Game." And I definitely agree that the whole confusion angle wouldn't work... the idea of a virtual hit man is so unusual that the dad would make perfectly sure that he knew exactly what it was. You really don't want any confusion when it comes to hit men. What's really happening here, the big picture, is a father trying to communicate with his son and not knowing how to, and instead of being forthright, he's going through intermediaries. Maybe the virtual hitman is the last one on the list.

How about raising the son's age by ten years? Instead of 23 he's 33. A real slacker and videogame addict. Or maybe let's steal... I mean, play homage to David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. We are several years into the future, you no longer need a console or controllers, The videogame company installs a bio-port that goes directly to your brain. Or the "Total Recall" way - either way you are plugged into a machine that makes the videogame seem completely real. (There, we have just cut a lot of CGI animation). So, people get addicted to the videogames because they can do anything: kill, die, jump off a building, fly, have sex with incredibly gorgeous women, anything you want - without consequences. The problem is that it's starts to get difficult for people to distinguish between games and reality. A twist: so, this 23 year old - Oedipus - hates his dad because he constantly tells him to get off that videogame. And the son decides to live a fantasy: hire a hitman in the virtual world to kill a virtual copy of his father. But he starts having some doubts. Did he hired a hitman in the real world? Is he still in the videogame? The hit was unsuccessful and now hitmen are after him. Part of the game? Another take, now in our real world and more like the original idea. The father married a rich woman, had a son and the rich woman died, leaving everything to her son. The father is somehow jealous. His son just spends all day playing videogames. And suddenly a man appears saying he's the biological father, he even has paternity tests to prove it, it turns out the mother had an affair. Now the father is really mad. He hires a hitman to kill the biological father, everything goes OK. Now to kill the son. But the father spent all his money. He has to somehow get money from his son to pay the hitman that will kill him. Other what if..... -Both father and son are hitmen? -The father accidentally hires a hitmen in a chat room and pays him in BitCoins thinking they're just gaming points, and he thinks he hired a hacker to "kill" the son's virtual identity. -Like in "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" it's an exaggerated story told by a patient in a mental institution. This time he feels guilty because he thinks he killed his son (it really was an accident - car accident? extreme sports?) -It's his stepson, not a biological son. -The father is a drug lord with easy access to hitmen? (And finds out he's not the biological father) -Or maybe the killer is the protagonist. His wife/couple is expecting a child, he really needs the money or the mob will kill him, but the fact that a father pays to kill his son really disturbs him. He has doubts, he wants to know why, maybe even wants to stop this from happening.

Maybe the father is a religious fanatic, he could even be a priest or a pastor. And he's convinced his son is the Antichrist. Of course, there's the "Thou Shall Not Kill" thing, but he thinks he has received messages from The Lord himself, and he personally commands him to kill the Antichrist. He tried, but was too weak. The next best thing he can do is to hire a pro.

Or as a little independent picture. A very loving and caring father (widower). And the kid is an extremely intelligent kid. He speed reads all the books for all the subjects in a couple of days and can be a slacker for the whole year. Yes, that gifted. Teachers and students hate him, they're really jealous. You think a boy that spends most of the classes playing videogames wouldn't know the answer, but he's so gifted he can answer anything in amazing detail. Now, he is a loner. Not a single friend. And starts becoming more. Even so that he doesn't talk to his father. He asks his meals to be put in front of the door, forbids his mother to enter his room. One day she does, and finds out he's obsessed with the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings. He finds plans for an attack, guns. He's afraid of confronting him. He calls the police but his son finds out and escapes with a lot of guns. Now the father has to hire a hitman to find his son before a tragedy is unleashed.

Yes, unfortunately movies that feature videogames tend to look outdated. War Games. The Last Starfighter. I haven't watched Ender's Game. I do think blueneumann's comment to make perfectly clear the father knows what he's getting into depends on the genre. Maybe if you are hiring Anton Chigurh it has to be perfectly clear. But how about a rookie, incompetent n00b hitman, Like Drillbit Taylor. So the father and the hitman try to scare the kid, but he always outsmarts them - like in Home Alone. It would be right into John Hughes territory.

What's funny is that in The Last Starfighter and the original Tron, the video game graphics were top-of-the-line, actual arcade games couldn't actually render those yet. So at the time, they were wildly futuristic. Then technology caught up. Seeing that the most graphically impressive video game out there at the moment is the South Park: Stick Of Truth game, maybe the look of the video game is more like Summer Wars or very stylized in another way. And that's part of the fun of the project-- you get to invent a new game. An effective virtual hitman, one that could get the kid off whenever he's on, I think would have to have multiple people working for him, in shifts, with different characters at extremely high levels, just find and kill, find and kill. Different characters so that the kid doesn't know if they're coming (and eventually he'd start to suspect anyone in the game, making him paranoid), high leveled so one hit and the kid's done... and if the kid fights back, he won't be able to for very long, and multiple people in shifts so that the kid can't slip by. The kid can't be in the game world for more than a minute without getting slayed (that's the thing about VIRTUAL hitmen-- you have to kill over and over). And it's probably like gold farming, there might be a small industry that takes a fee of a grand or something like that to just play the game and pick on people. Sounds like a lucrative business. I can just imagine their "office," not even a converted loft but a seedy little apartment with a bunch of overclocked computers with multiple screens, people crammed in there and doing nothing but gaming for 12 hours straight, keeping an eye on stuff. Imagine a heroin den but instead of drugs, it's battlestation gear everywhere. Which is all fine for them, but the real question is about the father and his son, THAT relationship, I keep imagining the father just wants his son back... maybe the mom died and the son retreated into the game to deal with the grief somehow (I'm flashing back to Hinokio). Maybe there's a financial element, some people get money playing these games, he could be making money to get out for good and never come back. I'm definitely getting this sense of pain from the father (maybe because I like characters in pain). Especially because we can't spend too much time in the game, watching people play games isn't interesting, and games activate the rewards center in our brains differently than movies do... we have a connection to our avatars in the same way we connect with our cars when we're driving, they become extensions of us, and that doesn't always translate right on screen. So the game sequences could almost be like racing sequences (and that gives us some great movies to draw inspiration from), but you can only have so much of that in the film. What Wargames did well was we didn't see Matthew Broderick AT the computer that much... he had these ideas and problems, and once he knew what to do, he'd go to his terminal and do it (and explain it to Ally Sheedy), and then we'd see him experience the results in the real world. But until the end of the movie, I don't think there's that much actual computer hacking going on. So I think what we'd be seeing is the relationship change between the father and son throughout the movie as the son's relationship with the game changes.

Assuming the game was 'real' enough, wouldn't "in-game hired assassin" be the ideal job for a serial killer? In real life, serial killers would make pretty poor assassins: they prefer helpless victims, and spend too much time and energy on the killing to be efficient hit men. In a game, especially if they hack the game rules and manipulate the situation to their advantage, this wouldn't be so much of a problem. But the serial killer enjoys their new job too much, and begins torturing and killing *all* the players. The games company hires a real life assassin to go into the game and take this guy out - but is real-world experience enough to get you though a game world where your enemy can manipulate reality...?