Sixcess said:
You may have a point if the child was alone with the game. Fortunately, she was not, and it is clear that the father was not only supervising but went on to clarify with the child her experiences afterwards.
This is what people mean when they talk about good parenting. It's not about shielding the child from the (inevitable) experiences of the world, it's about guiding them through it. For instance, if she had come up with the wrong lesson from her experience (for instance, being upset at the guards for ruining things for her), then it's the parent's job to step in and correct that behavior.
Your counterexamples are also a bit heavy-handed. No one is claiming that
all M-rated games are acceptable; on the contrary, in order to prove the strong version of your argument, you need to show that
no M-rated games are acceptable. (I don't think anyone expects that - just be careful and clear about your claims, or risk being misunderstood.)
Moreover, there are key differences between your examples and Skyrim. Skyrim is a game where much of the player's actions are based solely on their own agency, with very little to no suggestion. She chose to "sword" the guy based on her own will, through no direction given by the game (or her father, so at all really), and so the punishment was hers and hers alone to bear. Contrasting to this, in Call of Duty, it is impossible to not play as a soldier who is directed to kill enemy combatants, with impunity and without remorse. That is, this can lead to difficult parenting situations (even via mere observation); e.g., "Daddy, why are you shooting those guys?" is much easier to explain in the context given by Skyrim than the context given by Call of Duty. Really, it's more about context than content.
(Meanwhile, GTA is a more complex example; on one hand, it's theoretically possible to end up with the same situation of crime-and-punishment and the lesson learned, on the other hand, there's a button to take peoples' cars, which is barely punished by the game, if at all - which is a huge crime in real life. In practice, I believe its surreal nature is so far removed from our own reality that it would be difficult to reconcile the game actions and real life actions, especially given the pervasive nature of crime without punishment in the game. In any event it doesn't pass the, "Why?" test, above.)
(Edit - formatting for readability.)