The White House has launched Arcade.Gov, a website of browser minigames built around Donald Trump’s immigration and border policies.
As spotted by IGN, the site includes mini-games based on games like Flappy Bird.
A snake-like game called Rio Run wants you to collect a chain of prisoners in orange jumpsuits, tallying a “deported” count at the end of each run.
Other games on the site include Build the Wall: Zombie Border Siege, a Tetris riff where players stack bricks against incoming “aliens” at the “Southern Border”, and Trump Savings Tycoon, which has a Washington DC backdrop and a falling-object catching mechanic, with memecoins and cash standing in for the usual coins or fruit, all in service of the game’s stated goal to “fill your kids’ Trump Accounts”.
In a tweet, the administration wrote: “Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account”.
A fifth game, Supply Line, is styled as a school-lunch sorting game: vegetables get waved through, while anything the game brands an “offensive foodstuff” gets knocked off the belt.
Videos posted to social media parody the boot-up sequence animations of retro consoles like PS2 and Xbox 360, alongside a Sega-esque logo reading “Maga”.
Administration spokesperson Abigail Jackson has previously defended the strategy, telling The New York Times: “Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the president’s extremely popular agenda. There’s a reason so many people try to copy our style – our message resonates”.
It’s the latest example of the Trump administration using gaming culture for political messaging, a pattern that has prompted objections from rights holders including Nintendo and The Pokémon Company.
Earlier this year, actor Steve Downes, who is best known in these parts as the man who brought Halo’s Master Chief to life, demanded the Trump administration remove his voice from a propaganda video glorifying the war in Iran, which was shared on the White House’s social media, describing it as “disgusting and juvenile war porn”.
