I think the first game I'll be playing on Christmas day will be Skyward Sword, not skyrim. I don't care about the metroid like back-tracking, I'll live with it.

I'll have to assume that you both already beat Arkham City.

Helped my son beat Arkham Asylum (mainly just had to do the boss fights for him). Will get him Arkham City when it goes cheaper. Buy games that I want, but don't play them much. I but more games for my son to play. Surprising to me how good my 6 yr old is at playing them. MDA doctors say that it is great for his hand-eye coordination and the way he lays on the table is great exercise too.

Damn... I wish I could expect something like that with some of my games... In the future...

My son is 6, but there are more factors to it than his age. He is in a wheelchair, has diminished muscle strength due to his FSH Muscular Dystrophy, and has developmental delays. He has a short range of vocabulary for his age and because of his disability is very stand-offish with kids his own age because he is scared he will get hurt. Games are the only thing he is good at doing, though I have to admit he does love doodling on his dry erase board. I'm proud of him, and he plays a lot of games (Call of Duty, Lego series, Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, LBP 1 and 2, Burn Out Paradise, MKvDC, Smackdown versus Raw 2007, 2008, and 2009) but I don't let him play GTA IV, Saboteur, or anything like that over the nudity and sexual content in them.

One definition of a Puritan is someone who's desperately afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun.

I don't think these have been posted yet:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/09
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/14

And "rape" shall no longer be known by that name, henceforth it shall be known as "forcy fun time"!

So violence for minors is cool?

I would argue that scantily clad girls (which is the case in Saboteur) and implied sex (GTA4) is far less potentially damaging than violence. It might not be suitable to subject a 6 year old to either (it's up to the parents I'd say), but excluding the former because he's young while including the latter seems... odd to me.

It's not like those games have explicit sex scenes (iirc), but CoD certainly has very graphic violence (depending on the game; executions, mass-murder of civilians etc).

I don't think either of those things are wrong in any way to have in a game, I just try to avoid making decisions based on what we as a knee-jerk reaction consider good/bad/shameful/immoral.

Did I say that? I don't think I said that. I was just pointing out the massive amounts of straw in your strawman.

Last I checked all games have violence in them in one manner or another. No one had issue with 6 year old kids playing Mario Bros on NES and yet that had a Plumber throwing fireballs at enemies and jumping on them. Also if everyone would get their heads out of their asses, I pointed out that he has a muscular disability. My wife is too weak to pull the trigger of a gun and my son's condition is more severe than hers. He hasn't the strength to do anything violent. I have always loved how everyone overlooks the facts about my son's condition and jump straight into bitching about the games. I don't want him playing games with nudity or implied sex and don't mind him playing games with guns because my father-in-law is ex-Army and retired Marine, and has a huge gun collection he regularly goes and shoots so my son is growing up around guns anyways. All he does in the game is start into the sky and shoot the guns and then throw grenades at his own feet.

He can't pull the trigger to a gun and will never be able to overpower anyone to do harm to them. There are studies that have shown that games affect the mind, but they also point out that it depends on the person's mental state to begin with. Playing violent video games don't make a person violent. Nudity and sex are bad for kids obviously but considering I have the midnight add-on which makes the female women in the bar topless. Violence is easier to combat than sexual situations (as society has shown with all the teen pregnancies compared to teen shootings).

As for MW2 you can skip the intro mission so that is a moot point for that. The rest of the levels are filled with you shooting armed terrorists.

If you think about it it is odd. Government says kids shouldn't play violent games before set age, yet at 18 years old they want you to get shipped off to be trained to kill people (whether they are called terrorists or not). Double standard?

My point was that one main reason everyone gets up in arms about kids playing those games is that they think they make a violent person. Yet kids get pregnant and commit murder who have never played a violent game or seen a movie glorifying pregnancy. Getting offended by my 6 year old playing violent games is dumb. I was hesitant to let him play until his doctors local (and specialists) said it was completely fine for him to play them even stating they were great for his hand-eye coordination. The local Children's Therapy Clinic even use COD on Wii for hand-eye exercises among other games like the exercise one's to help get them up and active (latter is useless for my son since he can't walk).

Also I should clarify, when I say play I mean he has them in. With COD and such all he does is load the level, look straight up, fire off all the ammo, chuck grenades making them fall back on him and kill his character. He respawns and does it all over again. Only games he actually plays through from start to end are the Lego games and LBP 1 and 2.

Actually the midnight addon was only free in UK. In US you had to pay $2.99 on PSN and not sure how many points on 360 or free to those who bought it when it first came out(like I did, but that was before he started playing because now he plays when he is home and I sit in front of the computer dabbling in programming and surfing the web or watching DVDs). This wiki talks about it in the Midnight and Nudity section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saboteur