This article seems to deliberately conflate an action with the use of that action as a symbol.

The reason leaving a photo with its eyes cut out for someone to find is hurtful is because of the symbolic meaning to that action and to the further deliberate action of leaving it out for them to find. It is something you would normally only do because you want them to be hurt.

The sanctimonious ending where you "give them a lecture on the metaphysical status of images" only further cements the point that the author is presenting a straw man.

Yes, publicizing symbolically awful things to people likely to be hurt by them is morally wrong. Posting pictures of an npc you beat up in a video game with "feminist got what's coming to her" is wrong, but not because you beat up an npc in a video game. It is wrong because you are publishing it with the intention to spread the repulsive message that feminists deserve to be beat up.

If the author wants to defend the proposition that "video game violence isn't innocent" then they would need to pose a different hypothetical. Is someone beating up npcs in a video game and not publishing it doing anything wrong? If one person kills an NPC because they are impeding a quest, and another person kills that same NPC because the player is racist and the NPC is black, does that difference make the second act morally wrong? even though no observer is ever going to be able to tell the difference between the two actions?

There are real questions to ask about this topic, but the article doesn't engage with any of them. Instead focusing on the use of actions in video games as a symbol outside video games, which does not support the hypothesis.