white house arcade (13. 786)

The already doltishly defaced White House web site, we can only hope the content is one day jettisoned into the Sun—and perhaps the whole presidential palace raised to the ground and begin anew, inshallah, though increasingly it looks like America may never recover from this grift and mean hatefulness—has, we learn through the litigious threats of the Tetris Company against the Trump administration for copyright infringement, wanting no association with the “Build the Wall” knock-off and successfully managed to get the game taken down, a bit of the Streisand Effect but drawing attention to the particularly pathetic and embarrassing, added a suite of video game clones, slapdash AI-generated, propagandised versions that are guaranteed to be unplayable with poorly designed mechanics that just pander to the xenophobia of the MAGA base.  Though the now gone Tetris mini-game (replaced with a place-holder) was probably the most offensive one—and dumb as the point of play is to remove blocks and not construct a barrier to repeal a zombie invasion at the border and the wall stacks up quickly, likely not in court to be ruled a violation of intellectual property due to its rules of play—there’s cheap points too for a Flappy Birds imitation of a bald eagle navigating a bill through Washington, a Snake-like game called Rio Run with border patrol agents blocking immigrants (OK, this is as bad as the Tetris takedown), a Roller Coaster Tycoon counterfeit with the goal of funding one’s children’s Trump Savings Accounts, gamified but without any educational content to help parents make informed investment decisions and lastly appealing to the MAHA wing, a Burger Chef knockoff to sort school lunches and Make America Healthy Again.