DigitalBattle.com

An excellent editorial is up on Wired that takes a look at the dilemma “gamer” parents have when looking up games for their children. The author relates it to himself, as well as gamers like us, asking his “gamer posse” just what to let his son play. The replies are quite surprising:

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. ”Everybody knows, as an adult, that the world is not always a nice place,” Crecente told me. “But I don’t want him to know that yet. I want him to have a childhood.” So he disallows games with “realistic” combat, like World War II titles, or Resistance: Fall of Man, but permits highly cartoony shooting, like Starfox on the Nintendo DS — since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.

Chris Anderson, my uber-boss — the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad — 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.”

But what about gaming time? How long would you let your kids play? Would you be willing to leave the controller for him/her? That’s another problem the author faced, comparing himself to a marijuana addict who “sternly lectures about the evils of marijuana while keeping a stash of Columbian Gold in my desk drawer at work.” Read the article for the answer.