Western civilisations traditionally set play against study, pleasure against effort, leisure against work, even if the seriousness of play is not necessarily denied. Nowadays, video games are a widespread leisure activity, and it seems that almost everyone plays, at all times and in all places, but in different ways depending on their age, sex and socio-professional category. As a leisure activity, video games should have nothing in common with the world of work. This assertion, which pretends to ignore the fact that video games are a fast-growing industrial sector, falls apart when we take a closer look at the content and the practices, playful and otherwise, to which they give rise. Far from being polar opposites, the two fields seem to interpenetrate and it becomes legitimate to ask what work does to video games and what video games do to work.