If this game was like SAO

[Kawada]

I never watched SoA, but do they ever go over the social/political ramifications of private company randomly killing citizens?

I imagine the government would have busted that in alpha/beta, lol.

iirc in the beta for SAO the game itself was pretty much a normal MMORPG (or VRMMORPG), and in it there were zones for PvP and naturally PKers showed up. When the game went 'live' and turned itself into the death game where the 10000 original players became trapped that's when things became interesting. Until the game went live there was no government interest per se (other than the VR tech iirc).

They do discuss the ramifications of PK, probably a bit on the superficial level, especially when a PK 'guild' named Laughing Coffin emerges as a threat. Actually I'm not sure how much they get into it in the anime, but I know they do examine PK in the various light novels. Hope that helps a bit.