You Guessed It........Skyrim

While others are posting super pertinent and thought-provoking apocalyptic ideas, I'm going to outline my paper a bit because

a. I finally have a direction
b. You can give me feedback and it will give you class credit
c. I didn't do the reading
d. But I will before Thursday, Professors Russell and DeLashmutt

So going back to the recent conversations around violence in video games, I find myself comparing two very different instances and contexts: Skyrim and Call of Duty. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the games, I won't explain them here but I recommend a quick Wikipedia search for grounding. Basically what I hope to get at between the two is the inobvious but somehow very palpable manifestations of violence.
I will delve a bit into the conversation around humanity's violence-crave and the evidence around that - virtual games (and childplay situations) that involve heavy themes of competition/domination, instincts (CS Lewis connection to be revealed!) and the motivation they give, and even, theologically, how violence is both a part of our sinful human narrative and the one thing that turns it around.

Maybe I'm casting out too many nets here, but whatever I'll narrow down later. Anyway:
The big factor that sets apart Skyrim and COD in their utilization/inclusion of violence and first-person killing is narrative. My argument isn't that packing murder into a nice, complex storyline is okay (or even terribly clever), but that violence as an aesthetic is entirely separate from violence as a necessary element. In COD you might have campaigns and other goal-driven 'storylines', but my sense is that in any other setting (WWI, Vietnam, Crusades) the tweaks between games would be so minor. It'd feel about the same shooting someone in one as it would the other - you are meeting objective A in the ___ war.
And let's be real - most COD players only own the game for multiplayer, which is also where I will make a comparison.
Video games, by nature, need, as outlined earlier, violence. Every game needs to fill the blank: 'get a certain number/amount of ____ and you win'. Skyrim contains and sometimes necessitates violence (as it must)  but COD fills the blank with kills while Skyrim fills the blank with many things. You need to kill to achieve those things, but killing and winning aren't the point. You're free to make them your goal, sure, but in doing that you lose a piece of the game; you are robbed some of what it was meant to be. The game loses some of its soul, and soon enough all games would look the same if you chose to play that way. COD, GTAV and others tend to skip to that place (or create complexities around it? The Aesthetic Violence?) while I believe Skyrim, Pokemon, Assassin's Creed, etc (Skyrim is my paper's focus) combat (lol) that trend. The story comes first and only through it are any elements necessitated, not any necessitated story built around those same elements.
Thoughts?