The Trump White House on Thursday released a horrible little propaganda arcade via its website, a collection of nasty riffs on popular games. Wrapped in the cutesy, nostalgic aesthetic of early-90s pixel art, these mindless fascist diversions are harmless-looking, but their intent is stomach-turning: this is the appropriation of play in service of propaganda. Itâs just the latest in a series of attempts from Trumpâs administration to use video game memes and imagery to further its messaging.
Having riffed on Halo and PokĂ©mon in social media ads last year, inviting potential ICE recruits to âstop the floodâ and âcatch âem allâ, this time the administration has ripped off a series of recognisable games. Flappy Bill, perhaps the least gross, is a version of the old mobile hit Flappy Bird, except here youâre an eagle with a scroll in its claws. Supply Line could almost be an educational game about healthy food in schools, where you sort junk food off a conveyor belt destined for school lunches, except for some reason you play as a boxer who becomes more bloodied with every seed-oil containing, ultra-processed food item that you fail to punch into the garbage chute.
Then come the really nasty ones: Build the Wall, which warps Tetris into a game where you must fortify the southern border to keep out âthe coming hordeâ, and an evil little take on Snake where you patrol the Rio Grande, collecting brown people who then follow you around in orange jumpsuits. The final game is Trump Savings Tycoon, where you âfill your kidsâ Trump accountsâ by catching bills and gold coins in a net. (The algae-beset Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is depicted in the foreground, inaccurately coloured in blue.)
I have played all of them, so that you donât have to. Build the Wall and Rio Run are actively disgusting, built around the naked dehumanisation of migrants, but mostly these games are just embarrassing. Like most things that come from the Trump White House communications team, they are mean-spirited, unimaginative and lazy. I have a strong suspicion that they are vibe-coded using AI, and I almost hope that they are, because the idea of humans spending their precious time on Earth making these horrid, half-arsed games makes me even sadder than playing them did.
Anyone involved in the creation of the original games that the White House Arcade is ripping off is surely cringeing. Members of the original Halo team were moved to speak out on social media after the White House posted a picture of Trump as Master Chief last year; I wonder if Sega will have anything to say about this trailer, which opens with a digital chorus singing âMagaaaaâ, soundtracking the sorry collection with music that sounds a lot like Sonicâs Green Hill Zone.
The leveraging of video games and their imagery for political influence has been under way for some time, beginning perhaps with 2014âs Gamergate, an online harassment movement that was stoked by Steve Bannon and far-right website Breitbart. Trump, alongside other rightwing regimes, has had an enormous head start on this front. âThe use of video game content, culture and aesthetics for communication is a feature of Trumpâs White House, rather than a bug, because much of the modern political right emerged from toxic game communities,â says George Osborn, author of Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence.
âActivists who shaped the Gamergate movement have become an established part of the political right ⊠Until now, it seemed to be restricted to social media posting. I estimated that video game-coded posts had approximately twice the reach of a regular White House Instagram post, suggesting it was able to simultaneously rile up audiences offended by its post and delight supporters. But the deployment of an arcade on its website marks a change of course ⊠Now, it appears that Trumpâs White House is ready to use games to begin to try to win over audiences â escalating from appropriating video game culture to ensnaring the medium itself for its own ends.â
Artists and activists have been using video games to put across political messages for a very long time. I have played games about escaping war-torn countries; about examining the paperwork of desperate people at the border of a fictional eastern bloc country; about running a dictatorship or taking one down. Governments, however, are new players in this space.
