ABSTRACT
According to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, concepts are meaningless unless they are helpful to the understanding and solution of significant contemporary problems (Deleuze and Parnet 1996). 1 In line with Deleuze, I will introduce the concept of the ‘gaming apparatus’ as a heuristic tool for the study of the political-ideological coloring of so-called serious games. These games have ‘an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement’ (Michael and Chen 2006, 21). Such a tool is important because, to date, much of the debate on serious games has merely been framed in terms of effectiveness without paying attention to their political-ideological interest. And when theorists do pay attention to the political-ideological interest of games, they barely involve the game’s medium specificity in their analyses.
