The White House has launched an online arcade where players can fly a bald eagle, sort school lunches and, rather unusually, deport immigrants.
The official White House website now features five playable browser games under its new “ARCADE” section.
Among them are Build the Wall and Rio Run, two games centred on the Trump administration’s approach to immigration and border security.
Build the Wall is about as the name suggests. The game plays like Tetris, with players fitting falling blocks together while defending the border from zombies.
Instead of the usual abstract blocks, the game puts them into a border defence scenario. Zombies represent the threat coming towards the border, while the player must build their defences.
It is Rio Run, however, that makes the White House’s arcade particularly striking.
The game is essentially Snake, but with immigration enforcement as its central mechanic.
Players move around the screen collecting people, with each person added to the growing line behind them. The aim is to continue collecting them before ultimately deporting them.
The characters also have different appearances. They appear to be male and include white, tan and Black characters.
This means a real-world political policy is not simply being referenced in the background. Deportation itself has become the gameplay mechanic.
The White House’s official description is considerably more understated. It calls Rio Run “Border patrol along the Rio Grande”. Playing the game gives that description considerably more context.
The same applies to Build the Wall. On the arcade’s main page, the White House describes it as “Protect the border from the coming horde”. The game then packages that idea into a familiar Tetris-style format, with zombies serving as the approaching threat.
The other three games are considerably less controversial, although they follow the same basic idea of turning political priorities into simple games.
Flappy Bill is a take on Flappy Bird, with players controlling a bald eagle flying down the National Mall. Supply Line asks players to sort school lunches, tying the gameplay to the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. Trump Savings Tycoon is centred around filling children’s Trump Accounts.
It is an unusual way for a government to communicate political ideas, to say the least.
Immigration enforcement is not an abstract subject in the United States. Turning it into a game where the player collects characters and sends them away creates a bizarre collision between serious politics and the mechanics of a simple browser game.
And that may be the strangest thing about the White House arcade.
There is nothing complicated about the games themselves. They use simple, recognisable formats that most people will understand almost immediately.
If you’ve ever played Snake or Tetris, you already know how they work.
What is unusual is what those familiar mechanics have been attached to.
The White House is not hiding the arcade away on a separate gaming website, either. It appears as an official section of the White House website, alongside presidential actions, administration information and the government’s stated priorities.
For a website normally associated with speeches, executive orders and press releases, finding a playable game about deporting people is certainly unexpected.
It is a strange direction to take what is, for the administration, a serious political viewpoint. At times, the simplicity of the games almost makes it feel as though the administration is laughing at the absurdity of its own policies.
It also raises the question of who these games are actually for.
The game formats will be familiar to people who grew up with titles such as Snake, Tetris and Flappy Bird. However, younger audiences already have an enormous pool of games to choose from, many of which are more polished and feature similar themes, whether seriously or as a joke.
So who is expected to visit the White House website, find the arcade and actually play these games?
Whether the arcade is intended as political messaging, entertainment, or both, it represents a distinctly modern way of presenting government policy.
You can read about Trump’s border agenda.
Or, apparently, you can play Snake and deport people yourself.
Feature Image Credit: The White House