The White House Made an Arcade Recreation Out of Deporting Individuals – Mother Jones

The new White House “arcade” web site lets customers reside out their pixelated border patrol fantasy.Mother Jones illustration; Whitehouse.gov

As of September 3, the official White House web site includes a web page titled “arcade,” the place customers can play video games like Rio Run, by which the participant—a pixelated, white, and balding Border Patrol agent—collects “border crossers” and provides them to a line of orange-jumpsuited figures trailing behind him. 

It’s a retro-cutesy model of the nightmarish and very real scenes of ICE brokers forcing immigrants, chained in a line, onto deportation planes. Other video games within the “arcade” embody Build the Wall, a Tetris rip-off by which the person builds a wall to “protect the border from the coming horde.” (Tetris, in response to Build the Wall, has posted on Instagram that the corporate takes copyright infringement “very seriously.”) There’s additionally an eagle-themed sport known as Flappy Bill, and a MAHA-oriented faculty lunch sport.

A White House spokesperson instructed CNN the arcade is “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.” It’s additionally a part of an extended American historical past of gaming as propaganda. 

As Jesse Robertson wrote for the Nation in 2024: “It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that today’s global gaming colossus is the offspring of the Pentagon; by some measures, the nearly $350 billion gaming industry is one of the Defense Department’s most significant innovations since the end of the Cold War.” Recruitment-by-gaming is a venture that the Pentagon has spent a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars} on, and it’s one which has paid massive dividends. 

In truth, one of many world’s first video video games, Spacewar!—launched in 1962 on punch-tape computer systems at MIT—was funded by a DOD grant. In 2002, the US Army launched a free-to-play pc sport known as, fittingly, America’s Army; a 2008 research discovered that the sport “had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” The sport proved extremely in style with US troopers and wannabe troopers, who have been enamored of its practical first-person-shooter gameplay. Members of the Army’s brass floated the thought of shipping computers to Afghanistan so enlisted males might play America’s Army whereas serving in the actual American Army. 

The sport ran for 20 years and reached thousands and thousands of potential recruits earlier than shutting down in 2022. “As time has passed and AA has fulfilled its mission, it is time to shift our focus to other new and innovative ways to assist the Army with comms and recruitment,” the sport’s builders wrote in a statement on the time. Today, the concepts behind America’s Army reside on by way of the army’s sponsorship of esports tournaments and Twitch streamers. Most just lately, an Army unit offered soldiers early access to Grand Theft Auto VI as an incentive for re-enlistment. 

It’s no shock, contemplating the “wartime recruitment” framing of ICE’s present hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its means from the army into the world of militarized immigration enforcement.

More video games, the White House web site says, are coming quickly.