I enjoy a lot of videogames that are all about shooting and killing. I also enjoy a bunch that aren't. Yet it makes me sad that in so many games, across genres, the application of violence is the primary lever with which the player can apply their intent to the game world, and a lot of game design revolves around increasingly elaborate systems determining just how deadly that violence is.

I'm not gonna stop enjoying my murder sprees through hordes of monsters powered by a google-maps-worthy talent tree and several spreadsheets worth of magic sword optimization out of some moral objection to violence, but I'd be very happy to see the same degree of sophistication and mechanical depth applied to other game mechanics as well, and probably feel better about that hobby of mine as a whole then.

It's hard to engagingly gamify conversations, working on your slide deck / spreadsheets, elevator pitches etc. as routes to apply agency into the world.

Tense situations are generally dangerous, and games tend to thrive on tension. Beyond abstract puzzles, simulations tend towards activities which are actually dangerous and discouraged in the real world; if it's not violence, it might be theft (Thief / Dishonored), high wire acrobatics (Mirror's Edge), high speed driving, etc.

Yeah, I don't really disagree. Though, I do feel like a lot of videogame violence is so detached from trying to simulate real-life combat (because it's building on decades worth of genre conventions more than anything) that it's abstract enough that you might as well use it to model just about any other kind of conflict or interaction in a game.

You can always play simulation games like Kerbal Space program or Cities Skylines. Those still have a tech tree although it may not be as complicated as the skill trees in Path of Exile or the class tree in Trees of Savior.

Because escapism involves leaving the norms, and most people are fortunate enough that violence is outside their normal life experience.

They never had that focus in the same degree. Count the percentage of time that's violent action in novels/films vs mainstream games, it's nowhere close. Or count the percent of nonviolent titles in yearly critically acclaimed works.

Novels and films are comparatively passive media. It's hard to gamify a stream of consciousness, the dance of a camera around a scene, or a conversation in quite the same way; conversation trees get tedious, cutscenes drag on too long and the game risks turning into an interactive movie, or end up with a walking simulator etc.

There's a place for those things but there's a different balance of pacing and tension. Most games more closely resemble thrillers because there's more intense experiences packed in.