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The new White House “arcade” website lets users live out their pixelated border patrol fantasy.<\/span>Mother Jones illustration; Whitehouse.gov<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As of September 3, <\/span>the official White House website features a page titled \u201carcade,\u201d<\/a> where users can play games like Rio Run, in which the player\u2014a pixelated, white, and balding Border Patrol agent\u2014collects \u201cborder crossers\u201d and adds them to a line of orange-jumpsuited figures trailing behind him.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a retro-cutesy version of the nightmarish and very real scenes<\/a> of ICE agents forcing immigrants, chained in a line, onto deportation planes. Other games in the \u201carcade\u201d include Build the Wall, a Tetris rip-off in which the user builds a wall to \u201cprotect the border from the coming horde.\u201d (Tetris, in response to Build the Wall, has posted on Instagram<\/a> that the company takes copyright infringement \u201cvery seriously.\u201d)\u00a0There\u2019s also an eagle-themed game called Flappy Bill, and a MAHA-oriented school lunch game.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise, considering the \u201cwartime recruitment\u201d framing of ICE\u2019s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n A White House spokesperson told CNN<\/a> the arcade is \u201can effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.\u201d It\u2019s also part of a long American history of gaming as propaganda.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Jesse Robertson wrote<\/a> for the Nation<\/em> in 2024: \u201cIt\u2019s hardly an exaggeration to say that today\u2019s global gaming colossus is the offspring of the Pentagon; by some measures, the nearly $350 billion gaming industry is one of the Defense Department\u2019s most significant innovations since the end of the Cold War.\u201d Recruitment-by-gaming is a project that the Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, and it\u2019s one that has paid big dividends.\u00a0<\/p>\n In fact, one of the world\u2019s first video games, Spacewar!<\/a>\u2014launched in 1962 on punch-tape computers at MIT\u2014was funded by a DOD grant. <\/strong>In 2002, the US Army launched a free-to-play computer game called, fittingly, America\u2019s Army; a 2008 study found that the game \u201chad more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.\u201d The game proved incredibly popular with US soldiers and wannabe soldiers, who were enamored of its realistic first-person-shooter gameplay. Members of the Army\u2019s brass floated the idea of shipping computers to Afghanistan<\/a> so enlisted men could play America\u2019s Army while serving in the real American Army.\u00a0<\/p>\n The game ran for 20 years and reached millions of potential recruits before shutting down in 2022. \u201cAs time has passed and\u00a0AA<\/em>\u00a0has fulfilled its mission, it is time to shift our focus to other new and innovative ways to assist the Army with comms and recruitment,\u201d the game\u2019s developers wrote in a statement<\/a> at the time. Today, the ideas behind America\u2019s Army live on through the military\u2019s sponsorship of esports tournaments<\/a> and Twitch streamers<\/a>. Most recently, an Army unit offered soldiers early access to Grand Theft Auto VI<\/a> as an incentive for re-enlistment.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise, considering the \u201cwartime recruitment\u201d framing<\/a> of ICE\u2019s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of militarized immigration enforcement. <\/p>\n More games, the White House website says, are coming soon. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n