Games and violence
The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence taking place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. Because the relationship between these two realms is not always obvious, this investigation is best served by specific examples.
In The Wire episode "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of a drug dealer Namond Brice (Julito McCullum) retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in, taking sanction in the home. Here, he turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the hyper-violent first person shooter Halo 2.
The deliberate hyperviolence of TV's Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) pales by comparison with the first person shooter game played by Jesse at the opening of the season 4 episode titled "Problem Dog" (2011). While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene with Jesse playing the FPS game Rage is used to highlight the moral conflict he feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs.
Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refused to "explain" the motivations of the shooters, but it offered some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates surprising skill at classical piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. A later scene shows the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive.
Trainers in a military academy can see through a cadet's eyes via a surveillance monitoring system as they cultivate skills in video games, violence and ruthless competition that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Ender's Game (2013) is anomalous in the history of games on film in reversing the generational condemnation of games and violence. In this case, it is the teenagers who remain morally centered during wartime, in spite of - or possibly because of - their exposure to video games.