There is a well-established literature on the gamification of political communication, and I confess I did not expect to be citing it in reference to an actual product on whitehouse.gov. And yet here we are. The Trump administration, in its latest bid to meet the public where it apparently believes the public lives, has launched “Arcade,” a collection of five retro-style video games embedded on the official White House website, each one a 16-bit vehicle for a policy priority.
Alexey K. / PexelsThe games are what you would expect if you handed the communications portfolio to someone whose formative intellectual experience was a coin-op in a strip mall. “Build the Wall” is a Tetris knockoff in which players stack bricks to stop “a coming horde” of brightly colored immigrants. “Rio Run” gives you a tiny suited figure, apparently modeled on border czar Tom Homan, who intercepts crossers and puts them in orange jumpsuits. “Supply Line” has you punching seed oils off a conveyor belt in the name of Make America Healthy Again. “Flappy Bill” sends an eagle carrying legislation across the National Mall. “Trump Savings Tycoon” asks you to catch flying dollars for the administration’s $1,000-per-child savings accounts.
Deputy Assistant to the President Kaelan Dorr described the project as “policy you can interact with,” which is the kind of phrase that sounds clever in a brainstorming session and catastrophic everywhere else. The White House statement framed the arcade as “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.” One notes the rhetorical architecture: the opposition is not merely wrong but literally joyless, and the proof is that the president has a Snake clone on his website.
Bill Nicholls (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsWhat is genuinely instructive here is not the games themselves, which are about as sophisticated as a 1985 quarter-eater, but the institutional logic they reveal. Governments have always produced propaganda. The Soviet Union had state-sponsored cinema. The British Ministry of Information commissioned Orwell. What is distinct about the Arcade is its deliberate aesthetic regression, its insistence that the appropriate register for communicating border policy and children’s financial planning is the pixelated vocabulary of a medium that was, at the time of these games’ originals, primarily consumed by pre-adolescents in food courts.
And then there is the matter of intellectual property, which the administration appears to have treated as a minor inconvenience. The Tetris Company issued a statement noting it “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’ and did not authorize or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game.” It added, with a precision that borders on the devastating, that “the object of the original game is to avoid building a wall.” For more than 40 years, the company said, Tetris “has brought people together across generations and cultures through play and joy.” They are reviewing the matter. One imagines the review will not be favorable.
cottonbro studio / PexelsThe administration also posted parody loading screens for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, and a Sega logo morphing into “MAGA.” One assumes those companies’ legal departments are also currently reviewing matters.
A sixth game is reportedly in production