A few months back I was scrolling through an article that said, “Virtual Reality is the future.” Not sure if that has become entirely true, but we can feel the essence of it already.
Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment or EDGE is the U.S. Army and Homeland Security Department’s $5.6 million VR simulation program, that has played a prominent role in the training of fire departments and police agencies and how they should respond to school shootings.
Now that the program has been a wide success, the entities behind the simulation are pushing it one step forward by creating an updated version for teachers. This new version will focus on guiding teachers – how they should react during a school shooting, take care of the children and keep themselves alive.
There will be three playable roles – teacher, shooter and officer. Playing as the teacher, the trainee must handle panicked students, find safe places to hide and ultimately survive the epidemic. As the shooter, the trainee would be free to roam around the place, speedrun and kill as many people as they can. For the officer’s part of the job, just find and kill the shooter.
The developers have taken references from a number of accountable shootouts in the past in order to make the game more realistic and believable. Several survival tactics like locking doors, staying away from windows, finding items for self-protection and creating barricades have been implemented in the game.
Tamara Griffith, one of the chief engineers working on EDGE describes, “The more experience you have, the better your chances of survival are. So this allows you to practice and have multiple experiences [and] know what works and what doesn’t work.”
A proper video is up and running on Gizmodo. Go check it out.
“With teachers, they did not self-select into a role where they expect to have bullets flying near them. Unfortunately, it’s becoming a reality,” Griffith said. “And so we want to give them that chance to understand what options are available to them and what might work well for them.”
School shootouts are extremely dangerous and can affect any victim’s mental and physical health. However, in India, there haven’t been many shootouts in the recent years. The only memory I have of is the 2007 incident of Euro International School, where two 8th standard students shot one of their friends because of a trifling fight.
Sadly, there are no such simulation programs over in India. In fact, we have a long way to go before government representatives even think of such programs as beneficial. Make sure to subscribe to our push-notifications and never miss anything important related to gaming. That’s all, stay safe, and Happy Gaming!
