Getting to the age where I'm thinking about having kids myself, I can really start to see where these protective parents are coming from. If you start thinking that you want to protect your baby from bad influences, games are a really good place to start.

My parents were incredibly liberal when it came to playing whatever I wanted: one of the first games I remember playing was Wolvenstein 3D. My mum occasionally kind of suggests that I've become jaded because of my excessive amount of gaming, but I really don't think that's the case.

On the other hand, I hardly think every game is okay for a kid to play. I mostly dislike 3D shooters because they seem to be very limited in scope (shoot/get shot/respawn). I think a game like GTA (equally violent, but much more diverse in interactivity) teaches you much more, and I do think I would encourage my kid to play a game such as that rather than a "brainless" shooter. But to be fair, even if a game isn't violent it can still be bloody stupid.

But I realise that by the time I have a kid I may be out of touch with the latest games and unable to judge their merit properly. If that's the case, I will have to trust my kid's taste, I suppose. =D

I'm a FPS gamer, but my parents have never said anything when I play, a game and there's excessive blood onscreen from headshots. (I never had my parents restrict violent videogames when I was younger though, since I didn't get into gaming until 3 years ago =P)

I disagree, although you probably meant in general. I'd prefer my kid playing the first Deus Ex for PC (Combines FPS action with RPG elements) rather then GTA, which is a game that I never really got into (The missions in Vice City were a bit monotone and all too similar)

They never did care. Christ, I'm pretty sure they were the ones that bought me Mortal Kombat for SNES. When I got older and was buying my old games, they'd come with me so I could purchase T or M games. It was never an issue, they were smart enough to realize that a)if I was going to play the game, I was going to play the game. If not here, somewhere else and b) that they had done a good enough job parenting to know that I wasn't going to go do something dumb because I "saw it in a game".

Also my dad thought the killing of cab drivers and hookers in GTA was like, the best thing ever. "Hit her with the bat!!"

Well, I played a lot of games with my mother, like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Shenmue... she is always amazed at how realistic it looks like and I remember she used to ask me to play them. :x

My upbringing was a very liberal one. It would be highly hypocritical of my parents to restrict my game playing when I've seen movies like Terminator 1 and 2 and the Godfather when I was a wee lad. Plus the notion of violence is pretty much around me through my house hold with my dad's fascination with World War II and my mom's fascination with serial killers. Though they did a very good job of raising me as I do know the difference between fantasy and reality. In fact, when I first was getting really into games, my parents were more concerned about my grades declining and not the content of them.

The only time I've had games restricted from me is when I was a friend's house and we were playing Street Fighter II. It started to become a very heated much, so much so that tempers were lost and his mom said we couldn't play fighting games anymore. I guess you could say that the fighting games caused our own real life violence, but I think it was because of the competiveness of the situation that caused it.

Whenever I have kids, I will be pretty liberal with them. I turned out just fine, just as long as I explain what is fantasy and reality to them, and be truthful to them, they'll be perfectly fine.

My parents weren't Nazi's when it came to video games. Of course, I was an older teen by the time really violent games started to come out. The only thing they were concerned about was the amount of time I spent playing video games.

But even that they were pretty flexible about it.

My folks aren't really concerned about video games. In fact it was my dad who introduced me to Doom back in the good'ole days.