Even puppies understand play vs. reality because it is so fundamental. I don't know how anyone can buy the concept that mashing the A button on a controller is going to turn you into a murderer or reveal your truest self.
It runs afoul of some formulations of Virtue ethics, where the idea is to cultivate certain proclivities and habits/patterns of thinking and behaving that make you “virtuous.”
In this case, the argument is that diminishing your capacity for empathy/compassion and gratifying violent or anti-social impulses are bad for you.
To implement virtue in duty: "You have a duty to act the actions of a virtuous person." To implement consequentialism in duty: "You have a duty to make a best-effort estimation of the outcomes, and choose the best."
To implement duty in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who knows these rules and lives by them." To implement consequentialism in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who always evaluates the possible outcomes, and chooses the best."
To implement duty in consequentialism: "Define 'good outcome' such that any good outcome is one where all of these rules were followed." To implement virtue in consequentialism: "The only truly valuable thing is personal virtue. Therefore, a 'good outcome' is one where you gain as much virtue-trait-stuff as possible."
For most situations, all ethical schools of thought wind up with the same answer (unless you’re an Ayn Rand devotee). Those aren’t the interesting parts of ethical theory though, the places where they disagree are the margins where the actual theoretical work is being done.
All three approaches only work if one accepts them, and then goes on to implement them all the time, for all the decisions made. Not possible, hence evil in the world. Hence conservatism is correct. I have been wrong all my life. Any philosophical means to achieve a better world that assumes good humans being good all the time, or even most of the time, is doomed to fail.
This is literally the problem virtue ethics was formulated to solve. It's less about the ideal decision and more about what virtues and habits you have cultivated in yourself.
I play GTA and such as videogames, not as morality simulators, because as morality simulators they fail, because there is hardly any moral theory that applies to them. Utilitarianism doesn't tell me to be moral in GTA, because the utiles in my accidentally running down a pedestrian simply because I got impatient at a red light and just drove anyhow is null. Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.
If you tried to read my personality by how I play GTA, you're going to get a very wrong reading, because I am well aware of how null the whole thing is, and I act accordingly. Nor do I find myself learning very much about myself. Nor do I find myself meditating on how flimsy the moral structure is constraining me, because GTA is not "just like the real world except for a few minor differences". It is utterly unlike the real world. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of moral analysis because in a very real way, the entire idea of morality applying to GTA is simply ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that I am a psychopath from a family of psychopaths because when we play chess with each other we kill, kill, kill without mercy or concern for how the poor chessmen feel.