I think my main issue with it is this: Interaction is the core of video gaming, it is the main thing that distinguishes it from other, passive media like films or books, and certainly the major appeal of video games. I am incredibly disappointed that within this medium, so many developers choose to make games where the main or, not uncommonly, only way you really interact with the world is through violence. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with that on its own, I enjoy violent games too as my GOTY votes reflect every year and will this year, but there is when it's so very dominant and big budgets are only rarely devoted to games that try to do something different, and when one of the main ways of increasing appeal of games is just upping the violence rather than pushing the medium forward by innovating and offering a truly different experience to players.
Given that the basic structure of a game is to "beat" or "overcome" some sort of challenge, or to reach some kind of goal, there are a lot more ways to do this via a form of "violence" that is an easy way to represent through a gaming medium.
You can see this in its roots. Chess and checkers have pieces (eating, taking, defeating, killing) each other, you have ships blowing up asteroids, Pacman eating ghosts, and Mario stomping on Goombas. We just see this scaled up now as games become fancier and more complex, but the underlying goal of using a kind of violence as a tool to achieve a goal or defeat a challenge still persists.
Especially now that a story and plot are large elements to games, drama at its basic level deals with protagonists vs. antagonists, and those plot elements are usually resolved via a type of violence. In books and film, violent resolutions are popular as well, but are not necessarily essential since there are many stories that have non=violent plot progression.
However, since violence is a simple and effective and most importantly, interactive, tool to convey the hero vs. villain archetype plot progression in a game, it seems to me like this would be the most common device used by a developer.
Conflict and competition is a basic principle in "playing to win", and conflict is inherently going to be closely associated with violence. Similar to real-life sports, games that have players compete against themselves(e.g. puzzle games, simulation games, strategy games, etc), against an AI (e.g. platformers, adventure games, etc) , or against other people (e.g. fighting games, RTS games, MOBA games, fighting games etc) are a form of controlled violence: a much better substitute for real violence.
I think the main issue is to what extent we want to see realistic and gory violence in our games, especially now that technology allows us to create more and more realistic representation of real life. But still, I think this is mostly a matter of taste and art - areas of human creativity and subjectivity that fall under first amendment protections.