Lots of differences.
I’m reminded of a legal argument about pornography, in which someone drew a simple stick figure, with a line for a body, four more lines for arms and legs, and a circle for a head.
As such, quite legal. But then, if you say that the same stick figure is of an underage girl who is naked, it is technically illegal, because it is a “depiction” of a child.
In the case of a violent video game, depictions of murder are just that. Nobody and nothing is murdered, just electrons are rearranged in different patterns on a computer screen, maybe with sound effects.
Take the old computer game of Pac-Man. Would it become violent and grotesque if someone describes the dots the Pac-Man was eating as “babies”, and the “ghosts” as “rapists”?
While a connection has been drawn between a psychopath or sociopath harming real animals when they are young, there has never been any serious evidence that EC comic books, rock and roll music, Warner Brothers cartoons, or video games have any ability to make someone dangerous who was not originally dangerous.
I would have tended to agree with you a decade or so ago. However, the desensitization of society to all manner of violence and perversion seems to have taken its toll on our country and our youth.I’m wondering how far it will go.
The appetite for such fare always demands more and better ( or in this case, worse.