The Trump White House on Thursday released a horrible little propaganda arcade via its website, a collection of nasty little riffs on popular games. Wrapped in the cutesy, nostalgic aesthetic of early-90s pixel art, these little fascist diversions are harmless-looking, but their intent is stomach-turning: this is the appropriation of play in service of propaganda. It’s just the latest in a series of attempts from Trump’s administration to use video game memes and imagery to further its messaging.
Having riffed on Halo and Pokémon in social media ads last year, inviting potential ICE recruits to “stop the flood” and “catch ’em all”, 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 you’re 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 “the coming horde”, 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 “fill your kids’ Trump accounts” 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 don’t have to. Build the Wall and Rio Run are actively disgusting, built around the naked dehumanisation of immigrants, 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 “Magaaaa”, soundtracking the sorry collection with music that sounds a lot like Sonic’s Green Hill Zone.
The leveraging of video games and their imagery for political influence has been under way for some time, beginning perhaps with 2014’s 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. “The use of video game content, culture and aesthetics for communication is a feature of Trump’s White House, rather than a bug, because much of the modern political right emerged from toxic game communities,” says George Osborn, author of Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence.
“Activists 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 Trump’s White House is ready to use games to begin to try to win over audiences – escalating from appropriating video game culture to ensnaring the medium itself for its own ends.”
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.
These games, in line with the Trump administration’s wider social media and communications strategy, are culture-war shitposting. They are almost entirely valueless, and exist more to rile us up than to actually persuade anyone of anything. If we attach too much outrage to them, we are playing being drawn into someone else’s game; it is deeply unlikely that a round of Rio Run is about to radicalise anyone who isn’t already fully on board with Trump’s whole schtick. But at a time when the Saudi Arabian wealth fund now co-owns one of the world’s biggest game publishers alongside an investment firm run by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, gaming’s propagandist potential should not be a blind spot.
