A new Arcade section on the official White House website now lets visitors play low resolution games about border enforcement, school lunches, legislation and Trump Accounts. The collection includes Build the Wall, Rio Run, Supply Line, Flappy Bill and Trump Savings Tycoon. A sixth tile says another game is coming soon.
The games are simple copies or variations of formats that almost everyone has seen before. Build the Wall borrows from Tetris. Rio Run looks and plays like Snake. Flappy Bill uses the basic idea behind Flappy Bird. Supply Line resembles old conveyor belt arcade games such as Tapper.
The unusual part is not the game design. It is that all five are sitting on WhiteHouse.gov and turning parts of President Donald Trump policy into arcade objectives.
Build the Wall turns immigration policy into Tetris
Build the Wall is probably the game that will get the most attention.
Colored blocks fall from the top of the screen and need to be arranged into solid lines. The White House describes the objective as protecting the border from what it calls the coming horde.
The game does not make the political message subtle. The border wall is the puzzle.
Another game, Rio Run, takes a similar approach. A Trump shaped character moves around the Rio Grande collecting small figures representing people crossing the border. Each figure joins the line behind the player as the score rises.
The format comes directly from Snake, one of the simplest games ever made. The White House version turns the familiar collect and grow mechanic into a border enforcement game.
School lunch gets an arcade game too
Supply Line moves away from immigration and focuses on the Make America Healthy Again campaign.
Food travels along a conveyor belt and the player has to remove items that fail the game standards for a healthy school lunch. The White House description tells players to sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again.
The game resembles Tapper and other old arcade titles where objects move quickly across the screen and the player has to react before they reach the end.
Compared with Build the Wall and Rio Run, Supply Line looks much closer to a traditional educational browser game. The policy branding is still obvious, but the underlying idea could easily have appeared on a health or nutrition website.
Flappy Bill sends an eagle over Washington
A bald eagle carries a bill over the National Mall while the player tries to keep it in the air and move through obstacles. The basic control idea comes from Flappy Bird, the mobile game that became a worldwide obsession more than a decade ago.
The White House description is wonderfully simple. Fly the bald eagle down the National Mall.
Trump Savings Tycoon also takes place above Washington. The player moves through the air collecting money and gold to fill Trump Accounts, the savings program for children that includes a federal contribution of $1,000 for eligible children born during the covered period.
Of all five games, that one might have the strangest transition from public policy to arcade logic. A federal child savings program is now represented by grabbing flying money over Washington.
Somebody at the White House really approved this
The games are not impressive enough to be interesting on their own. Most of them are tiny copies of things people have already played a hundred times. The weird part is seeing immigration policy, school lunches and savings accounts turned into arcade objectives on WhiteHouse.gov.
Build the Wall is probably the best example. There is no metaphor to work through. Blocks fall, you stack them, and the wall gets built. Rio Run does the same thing with border enforcement. Supply Line has you throwing out the wrong food. Trump Savings Tycoon has money flying through the air. Nobody involved seems particularly worried about subtlety.
What makes the page funny is how casually it all sits there next to normal government material. You can read about executive actions, open a presidential statement, then click over and play a border wall game that looks like something made for an old Flash website.
The rollout was just as strange. The White House promoted the games with fake console startup screens and even turned Sega into MAGA. At some point somebody pitched that idea in an actual meeting and the answer was apparently yes.
There is already another slot marked Coming Soon, so the arcade is not finished either. No next title has been announced yet, which leaves an unfortunate amount of room for speculation.
