The White House launches Arcade.gov, a retro video game platform that turns Trump policies into games

Donald Trump's White House has launched Arcade.gov, a retro video game platform that turns several of its policies into video games inspired by classics. In Build the Wall, for example, the player builds a Tetris-style border wall. In Rio Run we patrol the Rio Grande detaining immigrants in true Snake style. There is one (Supply Line) focused on recalling foods that don't fit with the Republican Make America Healthy Again initiative. And we have Trump Savings Tycoon, which is based on playing investing with various children's savings accounts. According to the White House, the platform seeks to present Trump's achievements in an entertaining and accessible way, contrasting them with what a spokesperson described as the "socialist vision" of the Democrats.

We could spread a bit of moral panic by saying that the Republican Administration uses video games (those damned devices that absorb the brains of our children) to implant its ideology, but the truth is that this is nothing more than the latest episode of an inevitable clash: the digital and analog generations live in parallel realities, in which the medium through which information and culture are consumed matters much more than the information itself. And in which the establishment is trying to make a gradual landing in which the conservatives have the advantage.

If on platforms like YouTube we find a massive presence of conservative analyzes on current events, it is, perhaps, because we are witnessing a generational social shift, but, above all, because (counterintuitively) conservative disseminators arrived earlier and better understood the tools of new formats to convey messages and create community. It is not true that new technologies, and social networks, have always been leaning to the right: Silicon Valley moguls have recounted profusely how the Biden Administration arbitrated its content for the sake of inclusivity. But with Trump's return, the desire to control the story through them became explicit. There are Elon Musk and Palantir as examples.

To say that there is an attempt to convert ideology into popular culture would be naive, and it is also something that, in one way or another, has been happening for decades. It would be more accurate to say that ideology is taking the form of user experience, because the new ideological battle consists not only of controlling messages, but of controlling formats and experiences. Classic propaganda told you what to think, but digital culture decides what you do and what rewards you receive. If soft shooting games (Fortnite) and hard shooting games (Call of Duty) are the most played in the United States, what should concern us is not ideology, but rather that the youngest people become familiar with war scenarios (in the best of cases) or become the best drone pilots right from school. To get out of the video game niche: no one has to make a treatise defending people from becoming superficial if the dynamic of Instagram (the great social validator of these years) consists of uploading photos and receiving likes in return.