More than serious: Medicine, games, and care

For some time, rhetorical games studies have been interested in the potential for serious games to materially affect and embody change in users, in social systems, and in the gaming industry itself. In this study, we use the occasion of the first videogame cleared for marketing as a medical device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—EndeavorRx—to examine material-discursive processes that transform a game into medicine, and that produce our ideas of “medicine,” “gaming,” and “seriousness.” Allowing scholarship from rhetorical games studies and from the rhetoric of health and medicine to inform one another, and analyzing textual evidence from materials that produced EndeavorRx’s identity as “medicine,” we argue this more-than-serious transformation habituates the public to a new market, affecting patients, institutions, and disciplinary boundaries.