(Warning! The following is baseless speculation! Digest with caution!)
One of the great myths of the information age is that media has no impact on the minds of children (or adults). It's a reaction against the equally mythical claims that "Doom turned my kids into Satanists!" No kid likes to be told his hobby is warping his mind, because he knows deep down that it isn't. Or is it? Or IS it? etc.
No game is going to make a healthy mind crack and go on a shooting spree, but it's disingenuous to think that our inputs have no effect on us. The mind is as Hofstadter's Who shoves whom around in the careenium? essay suggests: complex, chaotic, and full of pattern. New inputs come along and disrupt the pattern. Some inputs are shrugged off as irrelevant, some are absorbed and contribute to a radical change of the pattern. Who has never laughed at a film, tapped to a tune, or experienced the cringing horror of hearing that they're going to make Police Academy 8? Inputs matter, and violent games and films are just another input.
Anyone familiar with the theory of memes is better equipped to deal with incoming memes, but it's inexcusable hubris to think yourself such the master that your memetic firewall can inspect all memes objectively; every metric nanoshannon of information invading your sensorium is a meme insofar as it's an input to your brain.
It also appears that throughout life, the brain swings from being totally write-only (up to the age of about 6 months) to being totally read-only (beyond 80). This could simply be that a new input to an octogenarian is a smaller percentage change than the same input to a toddler.
What to do?
Given that all inputs change us, will it ever be safe to go outside again? I say: no, but safety is overrated. Change happens; live with it. You will not be the same person in 5 years or 5 minutes time, but that's no reason to hold a funeral for You2004. The change is continuous and unavoidable, although meme theory potentially lets us contrive to avoid some dangerous memes. In fact as always, evolution has already figured this one out. People don't need to understand memetics to know what they don't like.
The Evangelical memeplex, for example, actively discourages enlightening activities such as questioning, reading, and arguing, because it knows that it can't stand up to the Rationality memeplex. What's the payoff for the believer? Security. Fear of new ideas taps into the primal fear of death, because changing as a person really is like dying. Youths everywhere would "rather be dead than sell out to the Man", and in fact, the youth speaking those words will in a sense be dead by the time he's a filthy capitalist like everyone else.
So should I play Doom 3? Of course. Will it make me a different person? Of course. I can temper this change with what powers of introspection I have, but I can't avoid it completely, and neither can you or your children. Don't shield yourself from culture, but don't think a liberal viewing schedule won't affect your kids in some way.
If it makes you feel better, think of yourself as 4-dimensional with interesting variation along your time axis, instead of 3-dimensional, perpetually dying, scared and alone.
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