The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught in the middle of a school shooting, lasts for approximately ten minutes, the same length as a real American school shooting event. The game begins in an empty locker room. You hear gunfire from a distance, screaming, hurried footsteps, and heavy furniture hitting the ground. The sense of dissonance is immediate: a familiar landscape of youth and learning turns grimly into a fraught landscape. When you are surrounded by closets, with their doors open, you feel trapped: Get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gym, a two-minute countdown flashes on the screen. Shooter is heading your way. Hides.
Schoolchildren have been playing hide-and-seek for at least two millennia, and its appearance in this new, perverse context only exacerbates the sense of panic. At the gym, you scan the scene as the timer runs out. You can squeeze under the bleachers, but any child knows that’s a poor choice of hiding place: there’s little room to maneuver, and you can easily be seen through gaps. However, there are no better options. You creep under the planks and listen to the slow approach of footsteps. A series of keyboard prompts appear on the screen: “Up”, “Down”, “Up”, “Down”. Press the keys at the right time and your breathing will stabilize. A silhouette appears, and she hears the sound of a bullet hitting her room.
School shootings might be considered a tasteless topic in a video game, if not completely taboo, if it weren’t for the design of the final test in collaboration with Manuel and Patricia Oliver. Their son, Joaquin, died on Valentine’s Day 2018, in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. Joaquin was one of fourteen students and three staff members killed by a nineteen-year-old, after he took an Uber to school and wandered its hallways while firing a semi-automatic rifle. This remains the deadliest high school mass shooting in US history. (Two survivors of the event later died of apparent suicide.)
That morning, Manuel listened to music as he drove his son to school. Shortly before 8 I amJoaquin told his father he loved him as he opened the car door. Manuel asked his son to call him later that day; The family was close and enjoyed regular check-ins. In the early afternoon, Manuel received a phone call from Patricia informing him of a situation at the school. They and other distraught parents were shepherded through the ensuing chaos with what seemed to Manuel like a well-rehearsed skill. “There is a protocol,” Manuel said. “They’re treating it like a natural disaster. But we all know it’s the most bizarre disaster ever.” After the Oliver family arrived at the command center to await further news, emergency workers provided them with blankets, water bottles and slices of pizza. After midnight, the couple learned that their son was among the dead.
In the aftermath, Manuel, an illustrator and photographer who worked in the advertising industry, decided to channel his grief and anger into creative work. He added: “This process began shortly after the tragedy occurred.” A few weeks after the shooting, he painted a mural in Miami for his son along with the text “We demand change.” The piece went viral on the Internet. Feeling that he had already faced the worst possible fate, Manuel resorted to provocation to get his point across. “From art to subversive activism to advertising, I wanted to reach people,” he told me. He raised a banner bearing his son’s picture from a crane stationed near the White House. He created a one-man show, which toured to venues including The Public Theater, in New York, in which he hit a life-sized portrait of Joaquin with a hammer four times, one for each bullet that entered his son’s body. Last year, Oliver A Joaquin’s voice imitation Using artificial intelligence, a recording of her was played outside lawmakers’ offices on Capitol Hill. “It’s been six years, and you haven’t done anything,” Joaquin said.
Manuel showed a knack for projects that seemed designed to make her audience feel uncomfortable — and perhaps to ponder what it means to prioritize decency over the lives of schoolchildren. But he rejects the idea that he and Patricia’s organization, Change the Reference, are using discomfort as a tool. “Instead of discomfort, what we bring are unprecedented ideas, giving them a chance to succeed,” he said. “As a father, I have forfeited my right to feel uncomfortable honoring him.”
In late 2023, at Energy BBDO, a Chicago-based advertising firm, two creative directors named Zé Baldin and Gabriel Barrea first proposed the idea of a game set during a high school shooting. Raised with religion in Brazil, he was surprised in the United States to often hear politicians attribute mass shootings to video games, a common occurrence since at least the 1990s. In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that video games “create monsters.” In 2018, after the Parkland shooting, Trump held a meeting with gaming industry officials; He reportedly opened the meeting by playing a collection of violent video game clips, including one infamous level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), in which the player is allowed to participate in a mass shooting at a Moscow airport. . In 2024, some families whose children were shot to death in a massacre in Uvalde, Texas, filed a lawsuit that partly blamed Call of Duty for the event, claiming that the content influenced the killer.
Despite these concerns, peer-reviewed studies have often found no link between aggressive behavior in teens and the amount of time they spend playing video games. Baldin also knew that in countries where young people played video games more widely than in the United States, school shootings were fewer or nonexistent. (The Call of Duty publisher responded to Uvalde’s lawsuit by citing the same fact.) He reasoned that a video game that explicitly called for tighter gun controls would provide a counternarrative—the kind of provocative project Oliver was interested in. to support.
Baldin and Barea wrote a preliminary script outlining the game’s story, locations, mechanics, and educational elements, mostly inspired by data and reports from real-world incidents. “Delving into that universe was emotionally difficult,” Baldin recalls. “Studying what happened in previous shootings, understanding how the drills were conducted, and putting ourselves in the shoes of the children in these situations was heartbreaking.” When the team became confident with the pitch, Josh Gross, the company’s creative director, prepared them to take the idea to the Oliver family. “I was aware of how sensitive the topic was for them,” he said. “I was really hoping they would believe in the power of the idea.”
Gross’s fears were unfounded. Manuel told me that Joaquin loves video games. He would spend hours building the character FIFA Which looks just like him, and was begging to stop at the video game store on his way home from school. The game seemed like a fitting way to honor his memory. Furthermore, in video games, one takes an active role in the drama; The Olivers believed that the game could in turn be a more effective educational tool than simply passive media.
With the Oliver family on board, Energy BBDO reached out to Webcore Games, a development company based in Brazil, to see if they would be willing to implement the idea. “I’m not going to lie, I had concerns when I first heard about the project,” said Gustavo Peter, the game’s producer. He was concerned that the seriousness of the topic would cause controversy at the studio. “But after I learned about Change the Ref and their story, I understood better where the idea came from,” he said.
Most discussions among the development team centered on how much violence they should show on screen. Keeping in mind that some players may be survivors of school shootings, they agreed not to show blood or bodies. “The scenario itself is already very emotional, so we didn’t want to confuse the players,” Barea explained. The work also requires a philosophical shift for designers, who typically try to make their games increasingly fun through repetition. “In this case, our main goal was to start a larger discussion,” Peter said. “We did constant real-world testing so we wouldn’t forget that goal and add something that was only there to make the game more fun.”
The developers borrowed scenes from real-life accounts of school shootings. In one sequence, you must barricade a door using chairs or a jacket tied between the handles. In another story, she races to locate a set of keys in order to escape a locked hallway—a particularly poignant moment, as Joaquin was shot after he and his fellow students were cornered in a hallway on the third floor of his school.
Recreating the sense of horror involved in shooting was just one goal for Olivers. They also wanted to compensate for the feeling of hopelessness that such events tend to cause. As you escape from the school, you find several collectible documents, each based on real draft bills that activists say will help prevent more children from being slaughtered in American classrooms. One bill calls for background checks that would prevent anyone deemed high-risk from purchasing a gun. Another calls for raising the minimum age to purchase weapons, and a third urges a ban on assault weapons designed for war zones.
The game was completed in less than a year. Manuel told me that although he was closely involved in the planning and development, he was unable to do so. Patricia has only played this game once. “I needed to know what I was talking about,” she said. “But it’s not something I’m going to keep doing. I have to keep my sanity.”
According to Olivers, within a few weeks of The Final Exam being available as a free download on Steam, it has racked up a quarter of a million downloads. Tens of thousands of people have watched videos of other people playing it on YouTube and other streaming platforms. Not all players were supportive. “[It] “It ultimately focuses too heavily on politics,” one reviewer wrote on Steam. Manuel has little time for such accusations. “This is not a red or blue situation,” he told me. “This is about common sense. By ignoring the real situation here, and accepting the killing factory that we have normalized in our country, you become part of the problem.”
It’s undeniable that the gameplay in Final Test is rudimentary, but the gameplay isn’t the point. As part of educational programs, its provocation deepens its impact. One Steam reviewer called it perhaps “the scariest game I’ve ever played,” and it’s a chance for “adults to feel what some students go through every year,” in a very different way than watching the news. Given the subject matter, the game is produced with respect. If the shooter is caught, the screen turns red and displays one of several alert messages about the number of students killed in various shooting incidents in American schools. If you can escape into the sunlight, you hear the school bell ring; The screen shows no congratulatory message, just a grim confirmation that fifteen thousand students are shot in schools in America every year.
A few months ago, in September, Patricia Oliver attended the TwitchCon video game event in San Diego, where tens of thousands of people play new and upcoming games. At one point, she had the opportunity to watch attendees play the final test. It was a surreal moment. She saw teenage boys, some a similar age to Joaquin, writhing in discomfort, sometimes screaming, as they role-played re-creating her son’s final moments. “I felt pain in my heart,” Patricia told me. “I can only imagine these children carrying this fear into their lives, wondering if their schools were safe. It was painful to witness, but it strengthened my spirit to continue sharing Joaquin’s story. ♦
