The new White House "arcade" website lets users live out their pixelated border patrol fantasy.Mother Jones illustration; Whitehouse.gov
As of September 3, the official White House website features a page titled “arcade,” where users can play games like Rio Run, in which the player—a pixelated, white, and balding Border Patrol agent—collects “border crossers” and adds them to a line of orange-jumpsuited figures trailing behind him.
It’s a retro-cutesy version of the nightmarish and very real scenes of ICE agents forcing immigrants, chained in a line, onto deportation planes. Other games in the “arcade” include Build the Wall, a Tetris rip-off in which the user builds a wall to “protect the border from the coming horde.” (Tetris, in response to Build the Wall, has posted on Instagram that the company takes copyright infringement “very seriously.”) There’s also an eagle-themed game called Flappy Bill, and a MAHA-oriented school lunch game.
It’s no surprise, considering the “wartime recruitment” framing of ICE’s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of immigration enforcement.
A White House spokesperson told 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 also part of a long American history 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 project that the Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, and it’s one that has paid big dividends.
In fact, one of the world’s first video games, Spacewar!—launched in 1962 on punch-tape computers at MIT—was funded by a DOD grant. In 2002, the US Army launched a free-to-play computer game called, fittingly, America’s Army; a 2008 study found that the game “had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” 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’s brass floated the idea of shipping computers to Afghanistan so enlisted men could play America’s Army while serving in the real American Army.
The game ran for 20 years and reached millions of potential recruits before 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 game’s developers wrote in a statement at the time. Today, the ideas behind America’s Army live on through the military’s sponsorship of esports tournaments and Twitch streamers. Most recently, an Army unit offered soldiers early access to Grand Theft Auto VI as an incentive for re-enlistment.
It’s no surprise, considering the “wartime recruitment” framing of ICE’s current hiring push, that gaming as macho-fantasy agitprop would make its way from the military into the world of militarized immigration enforcement.
More games, the White House website says, are coming soon.
