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The White House wants Americans to know it can have fun too, and this week it decided a deportation-centred video game was the way to do it.
The Trump administration launched Arcade, a section of its official website featuring five low-resolution games modelled on classic titles, each one repackaging a different plank of the president’s agenda as a bit of pixelated fun.
The most contentious of the five is Rio Run, a reworking of the classic mobile game Snake. It features a digital version of Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, chasing migrants depicted with different skin tones along a grid representing the Rio Grande, on the border with Mexico.
A second game, Build the Wall, borrows its mechanics from Tetris. Instead of clearing lines, players stack sections of the border wall, guided by an in-game instruction to “protect the border from the coming horde.”
Rights groups did not take kindly to them.
Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation in Eagle Pass, Texas, said the games made her feel sick, adding that the administration had “been playing games with people’s lives for years” and now “made a video game of what they’re doing.”
She said the designers “have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others.”
Adriana Jasso, a programme coordinator at AMIGOS San Diego Community who works at the border, said the games betrayed a “lack of seriousness” from the administration at a time when people are dying in detention centres.
“This presents the issue as if it were a game, when in fact it is not,” she said.
The remaining three titles steer well clear of the border. Supply Line, a condensed nod to the arcade classic Tapper, has players sorting food along a moving conveyor belt and rejecting anything that fails to meet “Make America Healthy Again” standards.
Two more play out over the skies of Washington DC.
Flappy Bill, an evident riff on Flappy Bird, has a bald eagle carrying a piece of legislation across the National Mall, dodging obstacles along the way.
In Trump Savings Tycoon, players scoop up money falling from the sky to “fill your kids’ Trump Accounts,” a reference to the administration’s savings scheme that deposits $1,000 into an investment account for children born during Trump’s second term, running from 2025 to 2028.
A Sega-flavoured launch video
The White House announced Arcade on social media with a set of animations spoofing the loading screens of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.
One clip morphs the old Sega logo into “MAGA,” Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, before the White House’s X account issues its verdict in block capitals: “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.”
Asked about the launch, the White House told AFP in a statement that the administration is “laser focused on ways to innovate and tell the story of the President’s many accomplishments in a way that resonates with every American.”
It added that the arcade was meant “to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”
The launch lands as the administration ramps up its mass arrest and deportation programme for undocumented migrants, a central plank of the platform Trump campaigned on.
It is also the latest entry in a long pattern for his White House’s social media operation, which has previously set deportation footage to pop songs and posted ASMR-style videos of shackles, drawing criticism and occasional legal threats from musicians for using their work without permission.
Additional sources • AP, AFP