This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 12 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”

There’s something very sick and twisted about turning someone’s suffering into a game — and I don’t just mean that metaphorically. I mean like an actual game.

Earlier this month, the White House debuted five arcade-style video games on its official website, two of which centered around the administration’s immigration agenda. The first, called “Rio Run,” is basically a messed-up version of “Snake,” where the player is told to “patrol the line” along the Rio Grande and “pick up every crosser in the lot.” The goal is to beat your highest immigrant deportation score.

The second one, called “Build the Wall, Zombie Border Siege,” has since been removed from the White House website after Tetris warned that it takes copyright infringement “very seriously.” Tetris also denied any involvement in the game’s creation. The objective of that game was for players to stack Tetris-like blocks on top of one another to “protect the border from the coming horde.” (The White House did not respond to our request for comment about either of these games.)

But turning cruelty into a game isn’t new. In fact, stuff like this is one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book. It’s all about desensitizing people and building a reward structure: You’re given a task, told to do it repeatedly until you get better and beat your high score.

Games are also powerful because they create community. A lot of the time, they’re team-based, “us vs. them,” and they make it easy to hate the outsiders. That’s what makes this kind of propaganda so effective: It doesn’t necessarily ask you to hate someone; sometimes it just asks you to play against them.

In 1938 Nazi-controlled Germany, a children’s board game went on the market called “Juden Raus!” which translates to “Jews Out.” At first glance, it looks like a twisted version of Candyland. The board depicted a walled-up town, and the game was simple: roll the dice and move the player around the streets; once the player lands on a square marked as a “Jewish house,” the player rounds up the Jewish person for collection. The winner was the first person to collect, chase out and deposit six Jewish figures on the outskirts of the town.

At the time, it was slammed by the official SS newspaper, but not for gamifying hatred. Rather, Nazi leadership claimed the game trivialized its policy of cleansing Germany of Jews because it “presented the regime’s systematic hard work as a game of chance.” Think about that: Even the guys running the machinery of persecution seemed to understand the power of how a game like this could come across — the cheerful board, the cartoon figures, the rolling of dice, how ordinary it made something so horrifying seem.

It’s not just something that happened in Nazi Germany. In 2002, a white supremacist group in the U.S. released a video game called “Ethnic Cleansing” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Players started off by choosing an avatar. Among the selections were a KKK member and a neo-Nazi fascist. The main objective of this game was to hunt down and shoot Black, Latino and Jewish people through offensive urban landscapes.

A Wired article described it this way: “When a dark-skinned player is killed [in the game], a monkey sound is played … Jewish characters shout ‘oy vey’ when they are shot … Racist rock music, with hate-filled lyrics, blares on the soundtrack and National Alliance posters with the group’s URL are plastered on the virtual walls.”

These games, whether they’re pushed by racist manufacturers, white nationalists or our own government, don’t just make cruelty entertaining — they make it easier for the people playing them to stop seeing the thing they’re chasing, rounding up or shooting at as a human being.

The technology or the target may change, but the trick is always the same: Take a minority, turn them into an abstraction, a threat, an obstacle, a colorful pawn in a game, and make their humiliation into entertainment.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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