Wired's Clive Thompson called me up a few weeks back to talk to me about how I deal with Tristan playing video games. My 5-year-old son, for those of you who don't know, has written game reviews, play tested hardware and jammed with me on Guitar Hero.

I treat video games like I do television and movies, I restrict how much and what kind of games he can play.

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.

"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.

Thompson's boss Chris Anderson uses the Lego Rule, the same rule that the company uses to make their games.

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."

Thompson said he plans to use a mix of my policy and Anderson's for his own child. What's your take on child rearing and games? Brian Crecente

You Grew Up Playing Shoot'em-Up Games. Why Can't Your Kids? [Wired]