TV series use video games to transform living rooms into psychological spaces

Elsa Boyer analyzes how contemporary TV series like Homeland, Breaking Bad, and House of Cards employ video games as a plastic tool to transform living rooms into spaces of psychological intensity. In Homeland, a scene from season 1 shows Brody making pancakes while his son Chris plays Call of Duty; the juxtaposition of domestic sounds (butter sizzling) with game sounds (gunfire, explosions) evokes Brody's traumatic past in Iraq. In Breaking Bad season 4, Jesse's living room becomes a post-apocalyptic squat mirroring the game Rage, with camera movements blurring the boundary between real and virtual space, and a flash of Gale's murdered figure appearing in place of a game enemy. House of Cards uses a first-person shooter game and Vivaldi's 'Summer' to externalize Frank Underwood's vengeful fantasy. The article argues that these series use video games not as mere sociological cues but as compositional devices that saturate the present with distant geographies, past events, or extreme fabulations, bypassing dialogue or traditional flashbacks.