Last October, I ended a talk in Riga by begging a room of NATO communicators to take games seriously as a contested information space. I was mostly talking about adversaries: Russian streamers, Chinese censorship, propaganda games like Squad 22: ZOV. I did not expect that the clearest domestic example would show up on whitehouse.gov, but here we are.
Some facts first: on September 3, the White House launched an online "arcade" with five retro-style browser games promoting the administration's agenda. Build the Wall is a Tetris clone subtitled "Zombie Border Siege," where players stack blocks to "protect the border from the coming horde." When you lose, the screen reads "BORDER BREACHED." Rio Run is a Snake clone in which you "patrol the line" along the Rio Grande and "pick up every crosser" for a high score of deportations. Coverage of the game describes the player character as a figure resembling border czar Tom Homan, leading a line of migrants in orange jumpsuits. The other three are a little bit milder: Flappy Bill, a Flappy Bird riff where a bald eagle carries legislation past Washington monuments; Supply Line, a Tapper-style game about school lunches; and Trump Savings Tycoon, a Duck Hunt variant about filling kids' Trump accounts (whatever those are).
The White House posted promotional videos that copied the boot-up sequences of the Xbox and PlayStation consoles, altered the Sega logo to say “MAGA,” and, as Forbes reported, used music from the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog. The White House's head of digital strategy, Kaelan Dorr, wrote on X that this is "policy you can interact with" and said new games would roll out weekly.
The Tetris Company said it was not involved and that it takes copyright infringement "very seriously," adding that it believes in "bringing people together, not dividing them." Within about four days, Build the Wall was gone from the site. Rio Run was still up when CNN checked. The White House hasn't said why one game was pulled, and its statementframed the arcade as a contrast between "a culture of fun and winning" and "the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America."
I want to speak plainly about what the two immigration games represent. They cast migrants, in practice brown people crossing the southern border, as a zombie horde to be blocked and as objects to be collected. This dehumanization, presented like a toy, is simply appalling. And while the loudest condemnation came from Democrats and immigration advocates, IJR reported that some conservative commentators objected too, at least on the question of how taxpayer resources were used. The most vile gutter racism still seems to elicit a reaction, even if it is enacted into policy.
Is this “gameful propaganda?”
In my recent talk at Serious Play, I distinguished playfulness (freeform, no clear goal) from gamefulness (rules-based, goal-oriented). My argument was that governments engage with games gamefully: America's Army wanted recruits, and in the blogpost I wrote about the talk I also noticed that the Army offering a GTA VI leave pass wants to get soldiers to reenlist. I also floated the concept of "strategic playfulness," the possibility that a state might sometimes just want to dominate the terms of debate without a specific measurable outcome, and admitted I couldn't think of many examples.
The arcade sits awkwardly between the two. "Policy you can interact with" is a goal-oriented pitch, which is gameful. But what does Build the Wall accomplish? It isn't recruiting anyone, and nobody skeptical of the administration's immigration agenda will be won over by a bad Tetris. The games look cheap to make (some people online have speculated they were vibe-coded, though I haven't seen that confirmed), and they seem built for the screenshot, the quote-post, and the outrage cycle. The audience is the discourse, and the goal is to occupy it. It’s kind of playful, to extent trolling can be playful, but it also seems purpose-driven to provide rhetorical and political support for the administration.
Why did they do this?
I'd resist the temptation to say "this is what Republicans do." Earlier Republican administrations were hardly free of racialized politics, but they mostly worked through dogwhistles and deniability. The Trump communications shop, in contrast, is led by a proud troll that treats attention as the goal and provocation as the method. The White House has already used Call of Duty footage alongside footage of its Iran strikes and posted clips using Pokémon, which Nintendo said was done without permission. With the midterms about six weeks away, a cheap, provocative product aimed at the online base makes a certain grim sense.
The copyright angle supports the attention reading. Legal scholar Christopher Buccafusco told Newsweek that the legal question is mostly whether people might think Sega or Tetris endorsed the games, and that the borrowed branding serves mainly to draw attention. And Forbes noted that copyright law doesn't protect game mechanics, which is a big reason most publishers have stayed quiet. Tetris was in an unusually strong position because the game so closely imitated a specific, famous work. I'd add a less legal explanation: no company wants to be in a fight with the federal government.
There is also a cultural bet here. In Riga, I argued that far-right gaming spaces thrive on transgression (also the subject of an upcoming paper), that many streamers "wallow in hate speech" and that the sense of danger is the appeal, which makes it an easy vector for a hostile state to exploit. I worried about Russia doing this. The uncomfortable part is that the Trump-led Republican party is a lot closer to Russia in outlook than a viewpoint I recognize. Such a domestic government doesn't need a vector. It can simply speak the language of that culture directly. My research on affective masculinity is about how gaming culture generates and circulates feeling, including abusive feeling, among men. A government that wants to harness that energy has every reason to make cruelty look fun.
Interactive hate speech is a problem
This is where I think the games are worse than a meme. A meme asks you to look at something. A game asks you to do something. Ian Bogost called this "procedural rhetoric": the persuasive force of a game lies in the rules you act within, not just the images on screen. In Rio Run, the rules say the goal is to scoop up as many people as possible, and the reward is a higher score. In Build the Wall, those people are monsters, and their defeat is a win.
Dehumanizing language has a long record of preceding violence, and I don't think it's alarmist to say this. The point of turning people into zombies or "crossers" is to make the moral cost of harming them feel lower, and games are good at lowering friction. All of this is happening as ICE reportedly detained more than 50,000 people in August, which the government touted as a record. The arcade is not a distraction from that policy. It is a friendlier wrapper for it.
I also keep coming back to what happened next. In 2023, I wrote about Activision pulling a streamer's skin over anti-queer speech, and how companies were only beginning to figure out what kind of audience they wanted to cultivate. This time a company did push back, but on copyright grounds, and while it did say it believes in bringing people together, the more dehumanizing game is still online as far as I can tell. Most other publishers whose branding was borrowed said nothing. I don't say that to condemn anyone, since I understand the fear of political retaliation. But silence from the industry is part of how this becomes normal.
Get ready for more of this
Governments have used games for a long time, from America's Army to China's Glorious Mission to Russia's Squad 22, and I have spent a while arguing we should stop sneering at it. What I find striking is the direction of travel. Military games sought recruits and reputational goodwill for the services. The White House arcade shows that a civilian communications operation can use the same medium for domestic political warfare, with no need for a good game or a clear metric, only a reaction. If the weekly release schedule holds, this is a program and not a one-off, and other governments and campaigns will notice. They won't all need to be this crude.
I don't have a tidy answer for what to do about it. Copyright complaints turned out to be more effective than moral ones, which is a bleak lesson to draw. But I think the first step is what I asked in Riga: take games seriously as political space. That means not dismissing this as a stupid stunt to be sneered at and moved on from. It is a stupid stunt, and it is also a government testing what it can get away with in the world's most popular entertainment medium. We have to take it seriously.