All art is always political on some level. It reflects the attitudes of the culture that made it, at the very least. But video games are rarely explicitly political — unless they stumble into cultural hot spots, which usually shouldn’t be there in the first place. Now the GOP Arcade is flipping that view on its head by using video games not as entertainment, but to make a point.
The arcade is a collection of simple games all themed around recent politics. You’re rarely demanded to do much more than hit a few buttons or click on the screen repeatedly. It’s mostly about the context, which their YouTube video sums up:
The games themselves are often parodies of well-known games like Angry Birds, using a classic pixel art style. And The GOP Arcade definitely has a point of view, which you can guess from the screenshots:
The best game of the bunch is the New York Times-sponsored Vote Suppression Trail, which simulates the ongoing problems faced by three different people who simply want to vote in elections. When you play through all of it, it quickly becomes clear just who has the privilege of voting in America, and just how fragile that privilege is. Or the much simpler Thoughts And Prayers, which lets you offer thoughts and prayers for mass shootings, without doing anything substantial.
Besides making a political point, the site also hopes to make a point about Apple. These were supposed to be little games you could play on the App Store, but Everyday Arcade, the company behind the games, fell afoul of Apple’s review process, as they discuss in a lengthy Medium post pointing out that Apple doesn’t seem to have a problem with politics, unless you’re expected to really think about them:
Search for “Donald Trump” in the App Store. You will find at least three games where you literally take a shit on Donald Trump’s head. And more where you physically assault Trump and other well-known figures.
Meanwhile, GOP Arcade’s slightly more subtle parodies were stymied. What might have scared Apple off is the fact that this is largely unexplored territory: Video games as a way to better understand a point of view (by mocking the oppositional point of view). The GOP Arcade isn’t trying to teach lessons, they’re trying to satirize the theatrical brand of politics that they find absurd.
As video games expand as an art form, they’re running into more unspoken boundaries and unseen gatekeepers. Robert Yang, for example, has had a form of surrealism forced onto him because streaming websites and game merchants consider his work discussing homosexuality to be “explicit” in ways that bullet wounds and games about bikini volleyball somehow aren’t.
There’s nothing more powerful than simply being put in someone else’s frame of mind, and video games have a unique power to do so. Is putting human beings in a catapult and flinging them over a wall (as one game lets you do) offensive? Of course. But if it makes us question why anybody would talk about politics so crudely in the first place, that game, however simple, will have done its job. It just won’t have done it on the app store.