Gamer turns parent and realizes he's the first of the new breed

[Thorin]

The new breed being parents who have grown up with video games.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2007/04/gamesfrontiers_0409/

A lot of what he says makes sense to me, especially

As you'd expect, I found that joystick-wielding parents are much better than Hillary Clinton at parsing the nuances in various types of combat games. Brian Crecente, the editor of game blog Kotaku, takes an approach that most gamer parents described to me: They treat games as they would movies. If they're too adult in content for his 5-year-old son, he won't let his child even watch them being played.

That's pretty much how it is in my house (although I've slipped a couple of times).

Also, something I didn't know about Lego (but it makes sense now that I think about it):

Chris Anderson [..] suggested a even more intriguing strategy: the "Lego Rule."

The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. "You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns," Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you're killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. "But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto."

(I e-mailed Lego's spokesman Michael McNally, and he confirmed the company's Solomonic logic. Lego, he wrote, agrees that good-versus-evil combat "is at the root of children's play scenarios, and we believe is an important part of a child's exploration of the world." But they don't want it infecting the children's perception of the real world around them, so the solution is to place it decisively in the realm of fantasy.)

[Mr. Analog]

Without having kids I can't say for sure but I think my kids would have access to Mario type games for a while, after about 13 or 14 or so though, I'm pretty sure they'd be able to handle just about whatever they want as long as I've done my job as a parent making sure they can distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Also, no kid of mine will play Counterstrike (lol)...

[Thorin]

As said in another thread, one of the problems that crops up is younger kids watching the older kids.  Sure, the oldest is fourteen and distinguishes fairly well between reality and fantasy, but if the youngest is five and is watching, then what?  And no, you can't just send your fourteen year old to play in a room with a closed door, because you're still responsible for their well-being and there is still the distinct possibility of online bullying, cyberstalking, etc.  Better to keep the games out in the open where you know what's going on.  Maybe limiting what times of day certain games can be played would help...  Just like I don't watch R-rated movies on the TV until after the kids have gone to bed and should be asleep.

Still, even at fourteen I'll be limiting what games get played - I stick to the ratings and the age ranges for the ratings unless I've played the game myself beforehand, and if I haven't played the game beforehand I try to be present to see what it's like before letting them play it on their own.

Most importantly, though, is restricting the time spent on the games.  If I were to pick on a game, I'd say no kids of mine will ever play World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot or the like.  But that's because I don't like how much time gets sunk into them and I don't want my kids to sink that much time into games.  Then again, kids have so much more leisure time than the adults that take care of them...

[Mr. Analog]

As geek dads we can also limit bandwidth or even schedule port outages thru router software or even force logouts on PCs and the like