The historical election of Donald Trump as the president of USA has influenced a lot of things among them is the new season of hit TV series American Horror Story, but the indie game developers at E3 2017 seem to have taken Trump's ideas too seriously and developed games around them.
The coming together of politics and game has been addressed by many at the event like Stephanie Barish. The chief executive of Indiecade said, "There's been a social political trend that we're seeing in the games... It was kind of amazing to think how personal, and thoughtful, and political, and meaningful developers are trying to make their games. They're using the medium of game making the way an artist would use their paintbrush to express what they're thinking and how they're feeling about the current political climate. There's a sense of resisting against a feeling of oppression or tyranny."
Cat in a Hijab is a mini-adventure, point and click game, where the user can play as a cat wearing a hijab, who boards a subway train. What follows is a series of racist comments hurled at the cat, such as, "Our hairball-in-chief is going to send you back to your own country soon."
The user playing as a cat can either defuse the situation or not with responses. The game was created as a result of #ResistJam backed by Indiecade, which aimed to create a creative response to the "rise of fascism" all over the world.
Another game developed by Christopher Jarvis titled Polititruth aims to tackle fake news. It works like Tinder, where you can either swipe left or right to decipher the reality of the news. The results of whether you were right or not is powered by Politifact, a fact-checking organisation that won Pulitzer for its work. The ultimate aim of the game is to make its way into Facebook to keep a check on the swarms of alternative news that the social media is a victim of.
Another game is titled Borders and is developed by Gonzalo Alvarez. In this game, the user plays as a character, who is trying to control a man attempting to cross the border from Mexico to come into the US. Alvarez expressed how personal the game is to him by saying, "My Dad crossed the border when he was 17. A lot of [his] stories are in the game. The border control, the helicopter that comes out later in the game."
Ms. Barish of Indiecade said, "I don't think millions of people are going to play these games and change their minds. But I think it's empowering a group of creators, and I do think there's enormous potential there."
Although these games seem more to be a commentary on POTUS Donald Trump's ideas, there are other games, which demonstrate Pro-Trump ideas like Make America Great Again: The Trump Presidency. It also lets the user simulate Trump's everyday life as a president. The game's description says, "a bulletproof man, the best bodyguard money can buy. He is sworn to protect the most hated presidential candidate of all time."
