Companies Distance Themselves As Players Recreate Trump Assassination Attempt In Fortnite, Roblox, And Minecraft

We live in interesting times, even if many of us wish we didn’t. On Saturday, a shooter attempted to take the life of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Milliseconds later, the internet was awash with memes making light of the situation. This clockwork cycle plays out following almost any event of significance; the modern internet has been engineered for it. But the attack on Trump has backed companies behind games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox into an odd corner. Memes are one thing, but full-on recreations of the moment in iconic game settings are something else.

The past few days have seen recreations of Trump’s brush with death circulate in and around multiple games. Whether in Fortnite, Minecraft, or Roblox, the most popular clips – which have amassed hundreds of thousands or in some cases millions of views – all tend to take the same form: visuals of a game character futilely sniping a recognizably Trumpian target while a digital audience looks on and real-life audio of the incident plays. These clips are adorned with text like “Bro’s aim is so bad” and “Trump rally be like.” 

It’s the kind of thing that shocks for a split second by catapulting a violent political event into a candy-colored playpen before almost immediately receding into the back of your mind, more grist for the endlessly churning meme mill. But these videos also rely on popular, kid-friendly games’ characters and settings, and what they depict is against those games’ rules. 

“Depictions of real-world violence are clearly prohibited by our Support-A-Creator rules and the creator of the video has been actioned accordingly,” an Epic spokesperson told Aftermath in response to a popular video I asked the company about. “We’ve also confirmed that the island shown in the video was never publicly available (published) in Fortnite.” 

However, according to a new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (via Wired), multiple player-made attempts at a "Trump vs Assassin" game type appeared in Fortnite following the assassination attempt, before being removed by Epic. Additionally, the organization was able to find numerous other player-created islands that propagated political violence, racism, and antisemitism, many of which it reported and some of which remain accessible despite that.

A spokesperson from Roblox Corporation replied similarly to Epic, noting that creators can use the company’s Roblox Studio tool to create scenarios that they don’t actually publish, which then serve as fodder for these sorts of videos. 

“While we value friendly debate about issues and topics that matter to our community, we prohibit the discussion or depiction of certain political content in order to maintain a civil and respectful environment,” the spokesperson told Aftermath, noting that prohibited topics include current candidates running for political office, sitting elected officials, political parties, and flag burning. "Many developers use Roblox Studio, our free application to create an experience, and don’t publish on Roblox platform, but often share the experience/gameplay on social media platforms."

Roblox will intervene in some cases where off-platform behavior is especially egregious, the spokesperson added: "If a developer created content in Roblox Studio that violated that policy – for example, making a credible real world threat and then posted it to another platform – Roblox can take action." 

The spokesperson also noted that ten percent of Roblox Corporation’s full-time workforce – plus “thousands” of contractors – are dedicated to content moderation, a net which is meant to prevent experiences that center around real-world political figures, among other things, from slipping through. But Roblox has over 70 million daily active users spread across over 5 million experiences. Sometimes rule-breaking experiences manage to make the cut, including – among others – one about the JFK assassination, as highlighted by YouTuber Schlep late last year. The Roblox spokesperson told Aftermath that the JFK experience is no longer accessible. As of yesterday evening, a small handful of Trump-themed experiences existed on the platform, but they did not appear to focus on the assassination attempt.   

Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, did not reply to a request for comment.

This all rests against a backdrop of companies and institutions awkwardly fumbling to figure out how to talk about the attempt on Trump’s life. Democrats have paused campaign-crucial efforts. Tenacious D canceled a tour after a joke from one of its members. Kick, the Twitch rival typically known for its almost-anything-goes approach to moderation, banned controversial streamer Steven “Destiny” Bonnell following inflammatory comments about Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter who died at Trump’s rally.  

The responses from Epic and Roblox Corporation paint a similar picture: Companies, despite providing the tools that form the backbone of these videos, largely believe themselves responsible while creations are within their games’ ecosystems. This makes a degree of sense, as even massive companies cannot be everywhere at all times. However, with engagement-thirsty platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube seemingly uninterested in damming up these streams of content, we end up in an odd spot where nobody is wholly responsible for videos that use popular IP to recreate the attempted murder of a former United States president and current presidential candidate. Game companies could probably cease-and-desist offending material if they really wanted to, but so far, it does not appear that any have opted to do so.

That’s not to say that somebody should be in a position to unilaterally do something about video game recreations of the assassination attempt. Online platforms continue to struggle to figure out where to draw the line when it comes to political content, with many opting to suppress it. Meanwhile, the United States government keeps on pushing a TikTok ban for reasons that register as Awfully Sus whether you view them through political or economic lenses. By comparison, some meme-y videos of a blocky Donald Trump ducking behind a podium – or in particularly minimalist interpretations, nothing – are the least of our problems. And while one could make the argument that this kind of content further raises the heat of the political cauldron that boiled over into last weekend’s assassination attempt, that’s fixating on a symptom rather than the root cause, which is – as Riley recently put it – “the Right’s violent rhetoric looping around to bite them in the ass.” People should be able to discuss these issues freely, even if only to joke about them. 

We're not in open-season territory here, however. Companies have a responsibility to proactively take down content that is hateful in its aims or associations, like the kind uncovered by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism in Fortnite, lest it be used to lure young users down the internet's darkest corridors. On this front they have routinely come up short, over-relying on user reports and broad rule sets that fail to catch savvily-packaged hate.

For the time being, at least, games will remain a thread in the larger tapestry of our engagement with these escalating events. People are stuck on a ride they desperately wish would stop or at least slow down, powered by online engines designed to siphon away negative feelings and turn them into fuel for a machine that exists simply to devour more fuel. So people rage at their own powerlessness – or just gawk, for fun – in the language of the time: nihilistic memes. As The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka recently described the phenomenon: 

"The form of the content — its production value and valence, like a subatomic particle’s spin — surpasses the underlying raw material. The attempted assassination of a former President is treated with the same catholic flippancy as a pop album or a Chinese glycine factory’s ads. … The result is not quite satire; it is absurdism without insight, our new lingua franca online. What qualifies as important is inextricable from what goes viral, and vice versa. ‘Brat summer’ has the same weight as an act of political violence, and thus the two are inevitably mixed to create something even more clickable. Meaning matters less than recognizability, the split second of understanding the joke."

But some with years of experience creating memes argue that meaning does still matter, that memes can outlive their moment. In the days following the assassination attempt, a 2016 game called Mr President! – in which you play as a bodyguard attempting to fling themselves in front of sniper bullets hurtling at a “bankrupt billionaire” who is obviously Donald Trump – received hundreds of new Steam reviews. “This game aged amazingly,” reads one. “Well damn,” reads another.

At the time of its release, Mr President! was largely regarded as a gimmick. Now it seems downright prescient. Despite the game’s wacky physics and short runtime, its developer, who goes by the handle Game Developer X, says it was always meant as a cautionary tale – not just a cheap meme.

"When I originally created Mr.President! before the 2016 election, it was built around the logical conclusions of this megalomaniac figure who has openly expressed deep xenophobic rhetoric, admiration for dictators, blatant sexist history, and just a non-stop compulsive liar,” Game Developer X told Aftermath. “People can write it off as a dumbass physics game propped up and broadcasted by YouTubers, but that is the vehicle I chose to get my message across. … In many ways this game was built as a warning sign or a monument to a dark path our country missed. Eight years later this game is more relevant than the day it was made because of the lack of foresight and compassion this country has lost."