I'm tending towards the LoTR game due to my own bias...that way, I'll have a better chance of understanding what he's talking about when he whines or jubilates about the game.
I think that's rather unlikely
. As soon as he tells you that he did the chicken run in under two hours, you'll be lost
.
You could start to play LotR yourself
At the moment I prefer LotR, because it has more like a story and not the more show-off gear and weapon competition. IMHO the ones who are most eager to bully others are the 13 to 16 year olds. If his friends are playing already, he should definitly start on the same server and try to be online at the same times - playing with others who have already some experience and a higher level might help him to get along better. Plus, they maybe can integrate him into a nice guild with some serious players.
with the MMORG's the same guidelines for kids should be valid as all over the web - don't tell your age, don't hand out private info and run to tell your parents if you're harrassed. After three years of WOW I can only say that in all that time I only had to write one single ticket to the gamemasters, because another player whispered a five-letter-word to my female orc-shaman. He just passed by, whispered "hi", I answered "hi", and his next response was "..." - I was quite shocked! But your son might have such encounters in any other online game. I found that there are lots of german players leaving the german WOW-servers, because they want new challenges and some of them start LotR. I fear that these might take the competition attitude also to that game.
As Dave said there are RP-servers and normal ones - but (I can only speak for the german ones) in the WOW forum there are a lot of complaints that most players don't care for RP rules and destroy the RP-feeling for others
I prefer the PvE (people versus environment) to the PvP (people versus people)-servers. On PvP servers there are - especially in the afternoon, so you can guess who that species is - lots of players who love to take a highlevel character into a lowlevel area of the other fraction to get easy kills and to "gank lowies".
Their form of bullying......
My daugher wants to play, too, but with 8 she's far too young - I might let her start at 11 or 12, but I'll make sure that I'll be online to watch her steps (And maybe to get her through the deathmines or ragefire with my - then hopefully 100er warlock
)
oh - another word to the servers - you can have up to ten different characters on a WOW-server and IIRC up to 10 different servers (make 100... :O ). On a normal server you can have both Horde and Alliance characters, on a RP server you have to decide between them.