So you didn't play DOOM or anything else before that age?
Yes, but we were talking about GTA. The first one at that.
Really the first game that made me sit back and take pause of the level of violence was the first Soldier of Fortune. The first time I blew off some dudes leg with a shotgun and the guy bled out kinda freaked me out. I was 20 by that time. Everything else was pretty cartoony. I'm not squeamish about violence and I don't think there's a hard age restriction on violence. Hell I grew up on gory 80's horror flicks as a kid. But with soldier of fortune it was one of the first times I played a game where the violence was there for the sake of being brutal. Even mortal kombat as a 13 year old was still tongue in cheek.
So really the question is what age would I let my child play a GTA game? Again depends on the emotional maturity of my children. I'm going to have my first next month. I'll have to see if she's even interested in stuff like that but say like at age 13 I'd have to judge for myself how she can handle it. Personally I don't mind gory things, but violence for the sake of violence like the torture scene in GTA 5 even in my 30s wasn't really something that was fun for me.
I'll be honest I don't really have the perspective of younger generations growing up on violent video games. When I was 8 the most horrifically violent video game you could play was probably Friday the Thirteenth for the C64. I was a teenager by the time Mortal Kombat came out. But what I do know is I grew up watching tons of horror flicks since I was six and I'd like to think I didn't grow up to be a psycho. So I'd like to think that kids can handle it. But really at the end of the day its not my call, its the parents. It's not like my folks would watch horror flicks with me, usually it was my older brother who would put them on while my folks were out and he was baby sitting me. But what really struck me was when I worked at gamestop in 2001-2003 and from 2011-2013 when we sold GTA games to parents they didn't care about the level of violence, all they cared about was if junior was going to see some boobs, cause you know, that would cause REAL damage.