Parkland victim's parents release school shooting video game - The game is filled with not only the sights and sounds of a school shooting including the gunfire, but it also features educational items.

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PARKLAND — Six years after losing their son in the massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, Joaquin Oliver's parents are sending a message through a new video game. It's called The Final Exam and to win, you must survive a school shooting.

The game is filled with not only the sights and sounds of a school shooting including the gunfire, but it also features educational items.

Not all parents are sure this is the way to prevent school shootings.

Broward County School Board member Lori Alhadeff lost her daughter Alyssa in the massacre, and she believes the game should be taken straight to legislators who can make real change, not students.

"I wouldn't want them to have trauma related to such a video and then I don't want kids scared to go to school," she said.

In the years since the tragedy, Manuel Oliver said there have been several more school shootings in the United States. He says there hasn't been any progress and that's why he and his wife created this game. The goal is to reach young people and teach them that there are laws that can help change things.

While playing the game, users will find information lodged in books, school boards and maps about school shootings. It will also reveal five pieces of legislation that could prevent future tragedies like the assault weapons ban, secure storage also known as Ethan's Law, the banning of high-capacity magazines, conducting universal background checks and raising the minimum age to purchase a weapon.

"We need young Americans to be aware of what's going on and to understand the bills, there's a whole complexity of law language behind these bills and one of the things that the game is doing is that make it that very comprehensible, very easy to understand," Oliver said.

Max Schacter lost his son Alex in the Parkland shooting. He gave CBS Miami this statement about the video game:

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The shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, remains the deadliest at a high school in U.S. history with 14 students and three staff members killed.

There's no winning for the parents of Parkland victims, but for the Olivers, The Final Exam can help prevent future tragedies.

"The root of the problem is not the games. The root of the problem is the easy access to guns," Oliver said.

To win the video game and survive the mass shooting, gamers must collect all five bills created to prevent future tragedies.

The Final Exam is designed to be played on computers and will be available free to download.

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The Last Stand said:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JaotiOp45dg
I was thinking something like this could/would be traumatizing to the victims that a tragic event is reduced to an interactive medium. That said, something like this could be interesting as a setpiece, not the entire video game.
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I could see a story about the aftermath of a school shooting working in a game about cleaning up crime scenes or investigating them. Not sure how you could make a game that takes place during a school shooting with actual gameplay without the media getting on the devs's asses.
 
Agent Abe Caprine said:
I could see a story about the aftermath of a school shooting working in a game about cleaning up crime scenes or investigating them.
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Who would be ballsy enough to use that subject matter in a video game? Let me rephrase, who would be ballsy and aware enough to use that subject matter?
 
"The root of the problem is not the games. The root of the problem is the easy access to guns," Oliver said.

I watched the playthrough and the thought that kept popping into my head was, "Boy, I really wish I had easy access to a gun right now."

Also, fuck these parents. It never happened to me, but I suspect that if my kid was killed in a massacre and a crew of people shoved a mic and camera in my face, I'd be telling them to get the fuck off my lawn before I physically encourage them.
 
ForTheHoard said:
"The root of the problem is not the games. The root of the problem is the easy access to guns," Oliver said.

I watched the playthrough and the thought that kept popping into my head was, "Boy, I really wish I had easy access to a gun right now."

Also, fuck these parents. It never happened to me, but I suspect that if my kid was killed in a massacre and a crew of people shoved a mic and camera in my face, I'd be telling them to get the fuck off my lawn before I physically encourage them.
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My thought was “why the fuck can I not ambush the shooter?” Unless this fucker is checking corners, put a stapler or rocks from the physical science class into a back pack or tie a sweater.

You could even use squad tactics rather than free for all. These people make horror movie protagonists seem intelligent. Pushing this idea that the shooter is playing in God mode is not going to help culturally. Have the player beat the shooter into begging for his life or some shit.

This shit emboldens shooters.
 
Why are the objectives so inane? It's basically "go here, now go here". My school did lockdown drills, which are basically safe unless the shooter got inside the room AND you got in a room before doors started closing and locking.

The second thing to do would be to just use the labyrinthine high school to your advantage and navigate a path to the exit (why aren't there any exit signs in this game?) and because my own high school was so large a single gunman would be unlikely to make any contingency plans unless explosives were involved.

The last thing to do would be to find some place nobody would expect to look. A "loner" not involved in extra-curricular shit probably wouldn't be aware of the theater workshop.

Statistically, if a gunman situation breaks out, unless you happen to be right there when he goes Natural Selection on you, the chances that you'll make it out alive and unharmed is well above 90%, and if proper procedure is followed—stay inside and follow lockdown rules or mad dash for the doors, you'll "win".

Assuming a lone gunman, there's only three ways to make such a game interesting. The first one is obvious—you're the shooter, try to rack up a high score before the cops come. (A bit trite, and definitely not the message they want to send). The second would be a "hero cop" but then it would come down to "kill him before he spots you" which is kind of boring for a game concept if there's only one of them. The third is if the gunman is specifically hunting YOU though that kind of defeats the purpose; school shooters aren't the strategic types.

Multiple shooters and traps would make things more interesting, making options like "fucking around in a hallway on the other floor on the other side of the building" and "go for the exits" less effective, and Die Hard in a high school with improvised weapons, stealth, and a mission to save as many students as possible could be great.
 
Party Hat Wurmple said:
This. The reality is, if you're in a classroom and a school shooter bursts in the door, your ONLY choice is to charge him. A classroom, you're confined and dead anyway. He's not going to miss. Hiding and hoping he goes away at 1% chance means only you and maybe a handful of others live. But if half the students hide, and 10 others charge him, even if he sprays and prays, somebody is getting to him. Sure, you basically guaranteed your death but that 1% you survive turns into 1% you save a lot of other kids.
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Oh I wasn't talking about fighting, as important as that is. We shouldn't expect schoolchildren to have to PvP shooters like some sort of asymmetric multiplayer game. There isn't really a one-size fits all solution to all cases of school shooters, other than forcing the media to clown on them relentlessly so that other losers don't see it as a way to instant infamy. Sometimes a pre-emptive red flag would work, sometimes the parents are the problem and sometimes its one of those bolt-from-the-blue incidents that you can't really account for.

All of the things that they propose fail in some way or another. The most obvious one is Safe Storage laws, which aren't going to fly after District of Columbia v. Heller ruled that forcing people to store weapons locked up and unloaded violates the 2nd Amendment. Raising the purchase age does nothing if the goober steals daddy's gun. An Assault Weapons Ban would probably also run afoul of Heller, as it would amount to a ban on most modern firearms. Magazine bans run into a minefield when you have magazines that can accept more than one caliber, or be transfered from one firearm to another. Background checks would be a huge mess as it would basically outlaw private sales, which I'm pretty sure would violate a huge bunch of commerce laws. Interstate commerce is how you got nationwide gay marriage, after all.
 
Breadbassket said:
It's called The Final Exam and to win, you must survive a school shooting.
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Cool!

I enjoy discussing defense in non-permissive environments. Perhaps the game will allow me to use a fire extinguisher as a tool to blind the attacker and as a weapon? Run cross country or track? Those spiked cleats can be useful. Baseball? Well, you have that bat.

Hell, even a janitors supply closet can be useful!

Some ammonia in one ziplock bag with bleach in the other taped together can create a rudimentary chemical bomb.
Breadbassket said:
Joaquin Oliver's parents
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Oh, its this man:
This man is an artist / activist even before Parkland. He is just using the tragedy to boost his own ego.
Breadbassket said:
While playing the game, users will find information lodged in books, school boards and maps about school shootings.
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The students should be focused one Run, Hide, Fight not reading books, sir.

Breadbassket said:
assault weapons ban, secure storage also known as Ethan's Law, the banning of high-capacity magazines, conducting universal background checks and raising the minimum age to purchase a weapon.
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  • Virginia Tech
  • Unenforceable prior to the act
  • Mags can be changed in a second or a second gun can be used.
  • Already a thing, its called banning private sales.
  • The age to own a weapon should be the age to consent to Troon surgery, age of majority and such.
To win the video game and survive the mass shooting, gamers must collect all five bills created to prevent future tragedies.
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So Stop the Killing isn't the goal of the game?

Am I supposed to let my fellow students bleed out as I read books?
 
ForTheHoard said:
"The root of the problem is not the games. The root of the problem is the easy access to guns," Oliver said.

I watched the playthrough and the thought that kept popping into my head was, "Boy, I really wish I had easy access to a gun right now."

Also, fuck these parents. It never happened to me, but I suspect that if my kid was killed in a massacre and a crew of people shoved a mic and camera in my face, I'd be telling them to get the fuck off my lawn before I physically encourage them.
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It's the gun culture and violence culture. The guns themselves are a problem because of the types of people who are using them to commit violent acts. We have a serious problem with the way we view guns and violence in America. But neither side wants to budge and come to an agreement on how to handle it. It's not going to make headway anytime soon either.

Also I'm disappointed no couch. :mad:
 
That's really fuckin lame and also pretty funny.

They should have just made it a Doom level like the Columbine guys did.
 
Breadbassket said:
Here is a full playthrough of the game.

The Final Exam - 2024 Anti School Shooting Game _ [No Commentary Playthrough 4K HDR].mp4
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The game is light on the sources it cites for the claims. Regarding the STANDARD magazines claim:

Methods: We extracted public mass shooting surveillance data from the Violence Project that matched our inclusion criteria of 4 or more fatalities in a public space during a single event. We performed regression discontinuity analysis, taking advantage of the imposition of the FAWB, which included a prohibition on large-capacity magazines in addition to assault weapons. We estimated a regression model of the 5-year moving average number of public mass shootings per year for the period of 1966 to 2019 controlling for population growth and homicides in general, introduced regression discontinuities in the intercept and a time trend for years coincident with the federal legislation (ie, 1994-2004), and also allowed for a differential effect of the homicide rate during this period. We introduced a second set of trend and intercept discontinuities for post-FAWB years to capture the effects of termination of the policy. We used the regression results to predict what would have happened from 1995 to 2019 had there been no FAWB and also to project what would have happened from 2005 onward had it remained in place.

Results:The FAWB resulted in a significant decrease in public mass shootings, number of gun deaths, and number of gun injuries. We estimate that the FAWB prevented 11 public mass shootings during the decade the ban was in place. A continuation of the FAWB would have prevented 30 public mass shootings that killed 339 people and injured an additional 1139 people.
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Basically, the tried to predict based on the trend during the AWB what would have happened...WITHOUT CONTROLLING FOR CULTURE.

Pendulous Dong said:
but why didn't he stay in that barricaded classroom? Why didn't he just stay in the locker? Is this game meant to teach you the incorrect way to survive an active shooter?
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The student did several things wrong.
  • He tied the sweater around the first gym doors but the second was wide open. Tie the other door closed!
  • He had the keys to open the doors but didn't bother locking the door.
  • The door barricade was poor. There seems to be enough objects to stack from the door to the wall to block it from opening.
The gun sounded like it was full auto so the shooter was chewing up ammo fast. Even if they shot the doors open, its one or two mags not spent on a living creature.
HodgePodgeRogerDodger said:
Unless this fucker is checking corners, put a stapler or rocks from the physical science class into a back pack or tie a sweater.
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I would save the backpack for books that can be used as makeshift armor is shit hit the fan.

Personally, I would beak some glass inside the sweater and warp shards so I can use as a weapon. But my first weapon would be a fire extinguisher if I had to fight.
 
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