ICTORIA TAPLIN of Chevy Chase, Md., has struggled for years with the question of whether to let her two sons, Russell, 11, and Paul, 8, play video games.

Ms. Taplin's concerns have traversed miles of psychological terrain mapped closely to what she has heard and read over the years: Games encourage obsessive behavior and rob boys of time for homework and other activities like sports and music; boys who play video games become socially isolated, their only friends existing on a computer screen. Her worst fear? That violent games might somehow bring out aggressive, even violent, impulses in her sons.

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Although she has read about a report from researchers at the University of Rochester that playing action video games can have a positive effect by improving visual attention skills, Ms. Taplin remains wary.

"The increased peripheral vision business is fine," she said of the study, which was published last week in the journal Nature. "But it doesn't address my concerns about violence and what happens to their attention span."

Ms. Taplin continued, "With all those images that flicker and flash, how will they be able to sit down and work with something that takes time to understand?"

Being a parent has never been easy, and armfuls of literature on the topic of video games aren't making it any easier. Sorting out the debate about the effects of electronic games on children and deciding on a set of guidelines can be an endless, and thankless, task.

Even experts disagree. One prominent group consisting mainly of censorship opponents has said that much of the research that links video games to violent behavior is flawed; it joined a court fight against a St. Louis law that barred minors from buying or renting violent games. The law was overturned by a federal appeals court on Tuesday.

News reports haven't always been helpful. Much of the news coverage of the Rochester study focused on the fact that a game used in the experiments was Medal of Honor, which requires players to kill or maim enemies. But the study's co-author, Daphne Bavelier, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, said those reports were misguided.

"I'm just pulling my hair," said Dr. Bavelier. "It's not about the killing." Nonviolent games would have worked for the study, she said, as long they demanded quick reflexes and pinpoint accuracy.

In the face of contradictory, inconclusive or just plain confusing evidence, some parents, like Ms. Taplin, agonize over what limits to set. Others agonize less, but are not always comfortable with what their children are doing or might be doing. Many parents rely on their own instincts and their knowledge of their children to set limits and construct rules.

"Parents are the best judges of their children and what they can handle," said Stephanie Greist, communications director for the Free Expression Policy Project, a nonprofit research group in New York that opposes censorship of media violence.

For some parents, the latest study was reassuring, if only in a fleeting way. Deborah Jospin, a friend of Ms. Taplin's who lives in Chevy Chase and has a consulting practice working with nonprofit organizations, said she and others in her circle of friends who struggle with the video game issue felt temporarily "forgiven" last week when they heard there were some benefits to video game playing.

"Everyone was saying, 'Phew, there's some value, they're not just a mindless, ridiculous waste of time,' " said Ms. Jospin, the mother of two boys, Jonathan and Matthew Dutko, 10 and 8. At the same time, she said, "we all sort of laughed about it, because they'll be trained to look out of the corner of their eye for someone with a gun."

Patricia Greenfield, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the Children's Digital Media Center there, said the Rochester study corroborated work that she and colleagues published in 1994. "The cognitive effects are clear," she said. "Video games develop selective visual attention such as skill in monitoring more than one location simultaneously."

Professor Greenfield emphasized that nonviolent video games can develop the same visual skills. "Just because a violent game develops visual skills doesn't mean a parent would want their child to play, because it can also stimulate aggression and hostility," she said.

Richard Maddock, a psychiatrist at the University of California at Davis whose 13-year-old son plays video games, follows literature on the subject and read the article in Nature.

"I thought the results were persuasive and made a good case that certain kinds of skills are improved by these video games," Dr. Maddock said. "I don't find it surprising, because most mammals play when they're young, and the purpose of that is the acquisition of skills they're going to need to survive as adults."

Lee Stremba, a lawyer who lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 12, said he found the study thought-provoking.

"I think the games can have a favorable impact," Mr. Stremba said. "We stay away from games of violence, but when it's not games of violence, I do think they get some benefit from games that require hand-eye coordination. I find it pretty amazing what little kids can do with these complicated games."

For many parents, the latest study won't do much to change the limits they've spent years working to establish. Dr. Maddock, for example, has worked out a complex set of time restrictions, confining game time to two hours a day and using the games as an incentive to finish homework. His 13-year-old son, Michael, does not own a game device and plays all his games on the family computer.

The time restriction is essential, said Dr. Maddock, who worries about what Michael would do if given his druthers. Without the time limit, "he would choose playing video games over almost any other activity," he said.

"For me," Dr. Maddock said, "the risk of the games is that they are so compelling that a child, if left to his own devices, might fail to play in other ways and fall behind in the acquisition of other kinds of skills."

Ms. Taplin and her husband have set strict conditions on Russell's video game playing.

For years, despite Russell's pleas, Ms. Taplin resisted buying him a video game machine. She finally "caved," as she put it, when Russell turned 10 and he was the only one in his peer group without a machine.

"They love going to each other's houses, and I didn't want my son to be the only one who didn't have video games," said Ms. Taplin. "I didn't want him to be an oddball child, marginalized socially." The first purchase was a Nintendo. Now the family owns a GameCube.

When they bought Russell the Nintendo, Ms. Taplin and her husband, Ben Delancy, both lawyers, drew up a contract and had Russell sign it. An excellent student, the boy agreed that he would not let his grades falter. If they did, he agreed, the games would be taken away. He also agreed to respect time limits set by his parents.

Ms. Taplin said there are also restrictions against acquiring games that contain killing and other graphic violence. She said she paid attention to the ratings on a game: she will not buy it unless it is rated E for everyone, meaning the game is for ages 6 and up. "I go for anything under T," she said, referring to games considered suitable for teenagers.

Yet even the E-rated sports games she allows her children to play emphasize violence. The Delancy boys' collection includes Blitz 2002, a football game with more than the usual amount of tackling, and Soccer Slam. The latter, said Andy Reiner, executive editor of Game Informer Magazine, "is more like 'American Gladiators' playing soccer.''

Ms. Taplin said her children sometimes traded games at school. "Sometimes I find these T-rated games in my house that I haven't bought," she said. "I should be cracking down on this a little bit more."

Furthermore, she said, "My husband is a little hard to control. Sometimes he lets them rent games with little figures on top of buildings trying to shoot each other off." One is Super Smash Bros. Melee, a T-rated game in which characters battle with swords and laser guns.

Ms. Jospin and others said they could not keep tabs on what their children did at friends' houses. "We've all been trained to ask if a friend's parents have guns, but it's kind of invasive to ask the friend's parents, 'And what kinds of video games will they be playing?' " said Shirley Sagawa, Ms. Jospin's business partner, who lives in Alexandria, Va., with her husband and three sons, ages 3, 8 and 10.

Enforcing the rules even at home can be tricky. Russell Delancy has a computer in his room but no Internet connection, and he frequently uses his mother's PC to go online to chat with friends.

A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Taplin said, she came home and found Russell and a friend in her office using her computer. "I saw a lot of blood," she said. "Someone had just been shot. It was a violent, awful image." She ordered them off the computer immediately. "Since then, I've been watching more closely," she said.

Although they might not be well versed in the particulars of the video games their children play, many parents strive for a general balance in a child's day.

"Parents need to think about what is being displaced when kids play video games, and balance any possible improvement in visual attention with that," said Jeanne Funk, a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo who has conducted several studies on the effects of video game violence.

Although experts continue to disagree on the long-term effects of violent video games, Dr. Funk said that her research suggests that immediately after playing a violent video game, people have more aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

"That doesn't mean they're going to go out and shoot somebody, but it might mean that they're going to be meaner to the people in their life and that they're going to look for the negative," Dr. Funk said.

This certainly proved to be the case for Costas Stavrou, an appliance repairman in Minneapolis who for years would not let his two sons, Geovanni, 14, and Johnny, 11, own a Playstation. Eventually, though, for Christmas in 2000 he and his wife gave in, figuring that at least if the children played at home and not at friends' houses, they could be monitored. One of the first games they got was a James Bond game.

The results were not pleasant. Mr. Stavrou noticed that each time the boys played, they fought with each other. Johnny grew especially aggressive, Mr. Stavrou said. "It's like he turns into the character of whatever games he's playing," he said.

After a few weeks, the Stavrous started to limit the boys to no more than 30 minutes at a time and an extra half-hour if they read for 15 minutes beforehand. The boys no longer play shooting games he said, only car racing and sports games.

"Once we put a limit on that stuff, it's been helping with Johnny's behavior," Mr. Stavrou said.

To provide balance in her children's lives, Ms. Sagawa of Alexandria said she and her husband employed a "keep them busy" strategy, with enough sports and homework to keep the children's minds off the games. Ms. Sagawa said she has found games useful as both incentive and punishment.

"They're too little to take the keys to the car away," she said. "But you can take away the Game Boy."

Others cope by banning video games altogether. Joseph Gault, a 6-year-old in Palo Alto, Calif., is not allowed to play video games, even at friends' houses. Instead, he is encouraged to read comic books. His father, Nick Gault, said he was comfortable with that decision. "You do see the natural interest in anything violent, but there are so many enjoyable means of media available that just not providing that doesn't seem like we're depriving him of anything," he said.

Somehow, though, when Joseph accompanies his father to Best Buy, he knows how to play the video games. "He's picking it up from somewhere," Mr. Gault said.