You ever noticed how everyone tries to get away with stuff by claiming its satire? These days, YouTubers are bashing people’s faces in with baseball bats and claiming it’s a “social experiment,” but the principle is the same.
Enter Donald Trump, Ted Nugent’s bowl of Cheese Puffs come to life. He feels a lot like a YouTuber’s social experiment. Alas, his presidential campaign is all too real, even though he himself has no interest in being president. Somebody like that is bound to spawn “comedy” movies and video games. One such attempt is on Kickstarter right now.
They changed it from Mexico to Hexico! So clever!
The title “Tonald Drump: Make Amagica Great, Again!” immediately clues you in to the level of comedy we’re dealing with. “WARNING: The proposed game is being developed by three dirty foreigners and one filthy American and is a work of SATIRE. It’s about FUN, not hate.” the opening of the campaign shouts. Welcome to the internet, where every piece of satire has to declare itself as such. Imagine if George Carlin constantly stopped his sets to remind everyone he making jokes, warned them no less.
The page makes no mention of who any of these developers are. Danny Andrews is listed as the developer, but other than that there are no names attached. Can you blame them?
There’s a trailer, which we’ll come back to, and walls of text making more or less the same joke over and over. The risks and challenges section is the longest part of the page, though that too breaks down into the same nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-enrebnQXEU
The joke here, if you were wonder, is that Donald Trump is really smart and a great businessman. That’s it. That’s the entirety of this side-splitting hilarity. Entire paragraphs are dedicated to ramming this joke home. “Har har, ramming,” you can almost hear the creators giggle.
The only sign this game is a real thing is the trailer, as the Kickstarter page is devoid of screenshots and art. Here is where Andrews and his team broke out the big guns. There’s a terrible voice over from someone doing a Morgan Freeman impression, there’s what is clearly an RPGMaker game, and there’s that same joke over and over and over and over and over…
There’s also a video explanation from one of the developers, who spends even more time explaining what the game is. This video is as unnecessary as the campaign itself. It describes in excoriating detail that this is satire and therefore cannot be taken seriously. It definitely doesn’t resemble any real life people. “See, you have to beat up Stephen Hawking and a guy named Steve because he’s brown,” the video seems to say.
This game isn’t terrible because it’s about Donald Trump, although any game about him is inherently awful. It’s terrible because the developers have no idea what “sarcasm” is, and perhaps how comedy works. The joke is summed up in the first blurb on the page, and just reworded constantly, making this very article seem tedious.
There’s a lot of material with Donald Trump, even if you do go the “Dear Leader” route with it. You can show him personally building the wall on the US-Mexico border out of gold bars. Have him fly around everyone on a magic carpet that’s woven from his hair. Have his wife speak entirely in stolen lines of dialogue from other games.
There’s no problem with comedy or satire when it’s done right. That’s not the case here though. A lot of work needs to be done if the developers want to come close to their $10,000 funding goal. This whole thing is probably just a trolling attempt though, so why bother?
Let’s see how many of the “keep politics out of gaming” crowd will jump on this game.
Those tags tho.