I would like to respond as a long-time gamer and game-designer + someone very conscious of the emotional aspect of murdering animals to eat them (and still does

I would like to respond as a long-time gamer and game-designer + someone very conscious of the emotional aspect of murdering animals to eat them (and still does it) from growing up with animals we later ate, + someone who believes strongly in non-violence at personal and global scales. I am an anecdotal entity of course, but here goes. A big big factor of why games are amazing is because they are a form of interactive escapism. You get to explore and experience extremely viscerally fun actions that you cannot reasonably do in real life. Driving a car recklessly is fun not because one likes to destroy property and endanger life, but because it comes with a sense of freedom and power. Similarly, tracking an erratically moving object and trying to tag it with a projectile is a challenging act that rewards mastery (archery contests are fun not because they encourage murdering people). These are all important aspects of game design. The visceral satisfaction of acts and contexts that we cannot easily partake of in real life are why video games are as popular as they are. It involves crushing of virtual skulls not so much to blow of steam or to allow us to pretend to be kind IRL, but because this is the simplest, no-frills context that's easy to communicate to a human living in our present world that has been raised on "action = violence" from movies and stories and wars. Yes, games have long been perpetrating this message too, but like say, the patriarchy, it didn't start here and probably wouldn't be here if the context it was born into was different. This is why as another commenter mentioned, there are large amounts of indie games now that depart from this recipe -- between a more peaceful society, greater acceptance of gaming, higher level of maturity of the professionals working in it, and better technology to provide richer storytelling -- to make non-violent games that explore other viscerally satisfying mechanics, interactive storytelling, neat mechanics, etc. Yet the violent games understandably will remain fun for all its original reasons, and until violence truly becomes a truly abhorrible aspect of mankind (not in our foreseeable future). You have inspired me to write a bit of a more in-depth blog post exploring violence and games, but I hope this colors the game industry as something better than merely a Murder Simulation Industry.