None, before my mom saw me play Soldier of Fortune and shoot a dudes’ ball off. After that she bought me an “educational, age appropriate game”, The Logical Journey of the Zoombini. I wasn’t supposed to play violent games, and instead play this game I was supposed to get bored of because it’s educational, and go play outside.

Jokes on her, I loved that game, and played it a ton.

Of course I ignored the rule of violent games and just learned to alt+tab as a reflex if I heard someone open my door. Useful skill in other parts of life as well…

We don’t buy games in this house, we pirate them.

They tried, but I don’t think they did a great job.

I was limited by time and duration. I wasn’t allowed to start playing games until like 3pm, and wasn’t allowed to play after dinner. (If I went to someone else’s house, the rule didn’t apply. If someone came to my place, video games were also allowed, but my parents didn’t like people coming over). I also had to finish all my homework first. I remember just watching the clock on the weekends waiting for it to tick over to 3pm, then dashing up the stairs to the games.

For some reason, I was allowed to watch as my TV as I wanted. I’m old and tv was limited, and we didn’t have all the channels.

What ended up happening is I would lie. I would say I had finished my homework when I hadn’t to get that sweet, limited video game time. I would say I was watching TV in the basement but I was playing games with the sound down.

This trashed my school habits. I was doing all my homework the morning it was due. I was a smart kid so everything was still getting done well enough for me to get B’s, but this wasn’t great. When I got to college I had no study habits or learning stamina.

To this day I kind of find tv and other passive watching unsatisfying. I never watch anything on my own. Only with someone else.

I don’t know what would have worked better. The clock based limit felt terrible though. Really hated that. Maybe if they had explained “if you put all your stat points in video games now, when skill ups are cheap, you’re going to be underpowered later” it would have landed.

I remember my mother briefly being resistant to getting me a violent game at some point. She was not that motivated to moderate what games I bought though. And eventually she didn’t seem to mind anything I was playing.

In my opinon; if you let your kids watch rambo, you better allow them to play rambo.

I made a PowerPoint presentation to convince them to let me play monster hunter when I was 13.

They let me.

My parents let me play whatever I wanted, even Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, but first they taught me the difference between fiction and reality and said I could play for a limited amount of hours per day, and only after doing my homework or after studying. Except on weekends, on weekends they let me play for longer, but also made sure I was playing offline too and going outside. It was pretty good.

The funny thing to me is that my dad would sometimes say it frustrated him that I liked video games because he thought they were “for boys” and yet he was the one who bought my (jailbroken) console and (pirated physical copies of) games until I turned 18 lol

None. My folks didn’t have any rules about games. Then again my parents really didn’t do rules.

My parents weren’t very restrictive. But one time, to get me to stop asking for a new game, my Dad said I couldn’t get any new ones until I beat the last game I got.

I think about that a lot still. I think it would have been a good rule, outside of some edge cases like games that were endless or too easy.

But it was off the cuff, he didn’t remember saying it. By the time I finished some game and brought it up, I think he said something like “well don’t you have other games you never finished?”

When I was maybe 10, I wanted Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis more than anything. My mother, who is an attorney, said it was too violent. So in order to convince her, I built a strong argument and plied her with it non-stop. I would argue that I was a smart kid and all that crap about video games making you violent was garbage. The argument that finally won me my beloved MK was that she had let me watch RoboCop the year before, and I hadn’t gotten messed up by that. After that I was pretty much allowed to play or watch whatever.

It’s the earliest I can remember really forming a coherent argument with supporting facts and whatnot, and advocating for what I want. It’s a skill that would serve me quite well going forward. Well played, Mom.

My parents were pretty opposed to violent media. As a younger child, I wasn’t really allowed to play anything that had explicit violence. Once instance I remember is when I was about 8 and we got a new PC that came bundled with Age of Empires 2. I was initially allowed to play it, but my dad took the CD away when he saw how much warfare it involved. Generally, they usually kept to the official age recommendations on the boxes. They relaxed their rules significantly from when I was around 12 though. That was also when I got my own PC and a Steam Account and they didn’t really check what I bought on there. Even got my mom to buy me GTA San Andreas (which has a 16+ recommendation here) when I was around 14. They never really approved necessarily, especially my dad, but they let me make my own decisions when they felt I was old enough.

I must say, great thread for a gamer that is now a parent.

In my childhood I could play anything, but graphics were not good enough to leave much marks.

Now my 11 year old worked his way up from GTA San Andreas to playing GTA5 and RDR2. He was watching the cut scenes anyway on YouTube (crappy moderation for violence there). Trying to avoid sex as much as possible, worried about GTA6 (we’ll probably play it together). Anyway, the greatest shock for him was the choice in GTA4 (kill your friend or the rich guy).

My parents simply didn’t buy any games beyond roller coaster tycoon 2, myst 3 exile, and MS combat flight sim WW2. So it didn’t really matter what the content was in any other games because that was it.

I ended up pirating whatever I wanted and my parents didn’t seem to care, I think it was more about being opposed to spending money on games. We didn’t have any consoles whatsoever.

None, really. I’d play Mortal Kombat with my much older sibling as a child and also grew up playing games like Diablo and GTA (the old ones). I really liked Carmageddon and Postal, too. TBH what I enjoyed the most about GTA was stealing cars and driving around in them. XD Or blocking traffic with a bunch of cars.

I had rules until I started getting an allowance and could guy my own games. That was around the time of GameCast.

Rules

• Nothing M rated
• Only 1 new game per year, so choose wisely
• We could rent from blockbuster, but I couldn’t rent the same game more than once, so I better finish that game in 3days, 5 days if they were feeling generous that week.
• I was allowed to borrow games between friends, but since I had like 4 games to trade, they never wanted to let me borrow their games.

I didn’t really have a whole lot of restrictions. My first home console was the Wii, and ofc there weren’t a lot of mature titles to worry about there. When I got a little older I got an Xbox 360 and really wanted to get Call of Duty, which my mother was a little hesitant about but eventually relented.

The real thing my mother cared about was online interactions. I was not allowed to be friends with people or talk to people I didn’t know. (Eventually I started doing it anyway, and she didn’t appreciate it when she found out)