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Through its first seven months, the Trump Administration has made massive cuts to public spending that have affected nearly every area of American life, from weather reporting and disaster response to arts funding. Video games are no exception.
The administration’s sweeping cuts have halted game preservation programs, virtual reality projects, and even game-related public health research. A report from Game Developer details some of the efforts affected by the lost funding, from the University of Washington’s Game Research Group, which launched in 2024 to “improve the accessibility of critical video games in cultural heritage institutions for educational purposes,” to a grant for a program at Arizona State University helping latinx students develop games about climate change.
Some projects had their funding removed just as they were about to complete. Rabindra Ratan, an associate professor at Michigan State, was developing a program to “reduce issues of Zoom fatigue and other types of gender and race inequities in the games industry related to virtual meetings.” A $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Future of Work program enabled Ratan’s work, but the Trump administration rescinded the grant earlier this year, preventing Ratan and his team from accessing the $200,000 they needed to complete
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