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Video games are the leading audio-visual leisure activity in France and, while they fascinate, they remain a source of worry and disrupt families’ educational norms. Video game addiction, that is so often the reason for consultation in contemporary professional clinical work, poses questions both as to its terminological relevance and the forms it takes at adolescence. The article proposes to set out a few key features in the existing scientific literature on addiction to video games and set this in perspective with concomitant disturbances like school refusal and depression. Clinical-theoretical thinking here revolves around the case of an adolescent taken in by a home for teenagers ( maison de l’adolescent). The case study addressed is based on the articulation between elements drawn from interviews and analysis of the psychological evaluation of a young male 16-year old. This paves the way for a discussion of the hypothesis whereby the video game world represents an elaborative narcissistic expedient and sustains a specific defensive arrangement facing depression, resonating with parental de-idealisation.