For us the current and past behavior of the child drove these decisions. When Wiz (also and Aspie) was violent he had NO violent games. He NEVER had any "shooting" games of any kind. period. in my humble opinion Aspies just need a LOT of maturity to handle this kind of thing. Often they seem to think that if it is OK in one area (video games) it is OK in other areas. I also limited any other games not rated E, any games where one player beat another player up, etc.... And if the graphics were in any way realistic they were GONE.
For a while we allowed Pokemon games because teh fighting is having one of your animals fight one of their animals until one animal passed out. No one died. No people hit.
Sadly, my difficult child had a huge obsession with dinosaurs which morphed as he grew and became an obsession with pokemon and similar games. This was HIS obsession, not part of his problem with violence. After that he had a few disney games, and things like the Mario Party games.
We also limited movies and tv drastically. At age 8 and 9 I had to limit EVERY movie/show that had any violence of any kind. And the Disney movies are actually VERY violent. Lion King went earlier than that because the scene where teh hyena threaten to kill Simba if he ever comes back to the elephant graveyard. But we had problems with most of their animated movies and a lot of the live action movies. It was really really HARD because NO ONE understood. They even showed these movies in school (I would have bent on school except that they would never TELL ME even later that day that they had shown X or Y movie. I had to find out from Wiz or another kid. And it ALWAYS was accompanied by increased violence from Wiz. Sigh.)
For some reason violence on tv, movies or video games was far more likely to lead to or feed into violent behavior than violence in books. So his reading material was not as restricted, though we are very conservative there also.
When you first go through and remove games and movies, and block tv channels, expect him to be furious and maybe even become violent and rage. After a while this should taper off. If there is just 1 game or 2, you may have luck just making them quietly disappear. I know some others say you should always tell your child, but at times it was better to just put the item up and play dumb when asked. In our situation it was because he would attack Jessie if I told him I was taking a game away because he was violent.
Some items we removed permanently. Some were removed until he had the violence under control for X amt of time. Some were removed until he could show us that he could make other choices to let off anger other than hurting people. It all depended on what was going on.
I know that my parents had problems when I put away things Wiz bought with his own money. Many were bought without my prior knowledge when his dad would take him places - simply because husband did NOT understand how violent Wiz was when husband wasn't around. Others were bought because Wiz told husband that "Mom said it was OK." - that was a 100% guarantee the item would be thrown away after being broken.
I just never felt that just because Wiz used his own $$ to get something we didn't approve of, or that led to him hurting us was a reason to let him keep it. Until he was 14 we told him that he didn't OWN anything that we couldn't take away if he abused it or we didn't approve of it. Any movie or game that we learned was violent after he spent $$ on it was gone. Period. So he had to make SURE that it met our standards or he was out the $$. It ended up beign a very good motivator to make him understand our standards. Because we felt NO compulsion to replace the item with something similar but nonviolent or to give him the $$ back.
Maybe we were too harsh, but his violence was so over the top that we had few other choices.
Use your instincts and the methods from The Explosive Child to navigate this.
If he has real trouble with giving away or selling a specific game or movie you may want to offer to let him have it back after X amt of time of appropriate choices. Or not.
Be SURE that if he sneaks an item that you put away that the consequences are steep. And DON'T let him argue or bargain his way out of the restrictions on violence. There is a lot more violence than an aspie can handle, in my opinion. They honestly truly do NOT understand how it can hurt others when they do things, esp if they are trying to act out things from movies or games. Games even sort of train them to act these things out. Maybe other kids don't get that from them, but it has been the result for Aspie kids according to the parents in the support groups I have been in over the years.
BE sure you do not allow play guns, even water guns, either. Hard as THAT can be, it is very important. Wiz was 15 before he had water guns. He had other things to shoot or squirt water, but no guns. I did allow the tubes with the handles that shot water out, but that was as close to a gun as he got.
