The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real shooting event in a U.S. school. The game opens in an empty locker room. You hear distant gunfire, screams, harried footsteps, and the thudding of heavy furniture being overturned. The sense of disharmony is immediate: a familiar scene of youth and learning is grimly debased into one of peril. As the lockers surround you, their doors gaping, you feel caged: get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gymnasium, a two-minute countdown flashes on screen. The shooter is headed your way. Hide.
The game of hide-and-seek has been played by schoolchildren for at least two millennia, and its appearance, in this perverse new context, only heightens the sense of panic. In the gym, you scan the scene as the timer depletes. You could squeeze beneath the bleachers, but any child knows that this is a poor choice of hiding place: there’s little room to maneuver, and you can be easily seen through the gaps. Still, there are no better options. You sneak under the planks and listen to the slow approach of footsteps. A series of keyboard prompts emerges onscreen: “up,” “down,” “up,” “down.” Press the keys in time and you will steady your breathing. A silhouette appears, and you hear the clunk of a bullet as it drops into its chamber.
A school shooting might be considered a tasteless subject for a video game, if not an entirely taboo one, had The Final Exam not been designed 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, in Parkland, Florida. Joaquin was one of fourteen pupils and three faculty members murdered by a nineteen-year-old who, having taken an Uber to the school, roamed its corridors while firing a semi-automatic rifle. It remains the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history. (Two survivors of the event later died by apparent suicide.)
That morning, Manuel listened to music as he drove his son to school. Shortly before 8 A.M., Joaquin told his father that 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. Early in the afternoon, Manuel received a call from Patricia informing him there was a situation at the school. They and other distraught parents were shepherded through the ensuing chaos with what felt to Manuel like well-rehearsed slickness. “There’s a protocol,” Manuel said. “They treat it like a natural disaster. But we all know that it’s the most unnatural disaster ever.” After the Olivers arrived at a “command center” to await further news, emergency workers provided them with blankets, bottles of water, and slices of pizza. Then, past midnight, the couple learned that their son was among the dead.
In the aftermath, Manuel, a painter and photographer who has worked in the advertising industry, decided to channel his grief and fury into creative work. “That process started very soon after the tragedy,” he said. A few weeks after the shooting, he painted a mural in Miami of his son alongside the text “We demand a change.” The piece went viral online. Manuel, feeling that he had already experienced the worst possible fate, embraced provocation to make his points. “From art to disruptive activism to advertising, I wanted to reach people,” he told me. He unfurled a banner of his son from a crane positioned near the White House. He created a one-man show, which has toured to venues including the Public Theatre, in New York, in which he struck a life-size portrait of Joaquin with a hammer four times, one for each bullet that had entered his son’s body. Last year, the Olivers created a simulation of Joaquin’s voice using A.I., and played a recording of it outside the offices of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing,” Joaquin said.
Manuel demonstrated a talent for projects that seemed designed to make their audience feel uneasy—and, perhaps, to reflect on what it means to prioritize decorum over the lives of schoolchildren. But he rejects the notion that he and Patricia’s organization, Change the Ref, uses discomfort as a tool. “Rather than discomfort, what we bring are ideas that are unprecedented, which gives them a chance to succeed,” he said. “As a father, I forfeited the right to feel uncomfortable when honoring him.”
In late 2023, at Energy B.B.D.O., a Chicago-based advertising firm, two creative directors named Zé Baldin and Gabriel Barrea first suggested the idea for a game set during a high-school shooting. Baldin had grown up in Brazil, and he was surprised, in the U.S., to hear politicians frequently attribute mass shootings to video games, a common occurrence since at least the nineteen-nineties. In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that video games were “creating monsters.” In 2018, after the Parkland shooting, Trump held a meeting with game-industry officials; he reportedly opened the meeting by playing a compilation of violent video-game clips, including one of a notorious 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 of the families whose children had been shot in a massacre in Uvalde, Texas, filed a suit that partially blamed the event on Call of Duty, claiming the content influenced the killer.
Despite such concerns, peer-reviewed studies have often found no link between aggressive behavior in teen-agers and the amount of time spent playing video games. Baldin also knew that, in countries where video games were more widely played by young people than in the U.S., there were fewer or no school shootings at all. (Call of Duty’s publisher responded to the Uvalde lawsuit by citing the same fact.) A video game that explicitly advocated for tighter gun controls would, he reasoned, provide a counter-narrative––just the kind of provocative project the Olivers were interested in supporting.
Baldin and Barrea wrote an initial script that outlined the game’s story line, locations, mechanics, and educational elements, mostly inspired by data and reports from real-world incidents. “Getting deeper into this universe was emotionally difficult,” Baldin recalled. “Studying what has happened in past shootings, understanding how drills take place, and putting ourselves in kids’ shoes in these situations was heartbreaking.” When the team was confident in the pitch, the company’s chief creative officer, Josh Gross, prepared for them to take the idea to the Olivers. “I was aware of how sensitive a subject it is 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 loved video games; he would spend hours building a character in FIFA who looked just like him, and would plead to stop at the video-game store on the way home from school. A game seemed like an apt way to honor his memory. Moreover, in video games, one plays an active role in the drama; the Olivers thought that a game could, in turn, be a more effective educational tool than a piece of passive media.
With the Olivers on board, Energy B.B.D.O. approached Webcore Games, a developer based in Brazil, to see if it might be willing to execute the idea. “I’m not going to lie, I had concerns the first time I heard about the project,” Gustavo Peter, a producer of the game, said. He worried that the gravity of the subject matter would mire the studio in controversy. “But after I learned about Change the Ref and their story, I understood better where the idea was coming from,” he said.
Most discussions among the development team centered on how much violence they should show onscreen. Mindful that some players might be survivors of school shootings, they agreed to not show blood or bodies. “The scenario itself is already deeply emotional, so we didn’t want to overwhelm players,” Barrea explained. The work also required a philosophical shift for the designers, who typically attempt to make their games increasingly enjoyable through iteration. “In this case, our main objective was to start a bigger discussion,” Peter said. “We had constant reality checks so that we wouldn’t forget that objective and add something that was only there to make the game more fun.”
The developers borrowed scenes from real-world accounts of school shootings. In one sequence, you must barricade a door using chairs or a sweater tied between the handles. In another, you rush to locate a set of keys in order to escape a locked corridor—an especially wrenching moment, as Joaquin was shot after he and fellow-students became trapped in a hallway on the third floor of his school.
Re-creating the sense of terror involved in a shooting was just one goal for the Olivers; they also wanted to offset the sense of hopelessness that such events tend to induce. While escaping the school, you find several collectible documents, each based on real draft bills that campaigners argue will help prevent the slaughter of more children in American classrooms. One bill demands 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 the banning of assault weapons that were designed for war zones.
The game was completed in less than a year. Manuel told me that, although he was intimately involved in its planning and development, he couldn’t bring himself to play it through. Patricia has played it just once. “I needed to know what I was talking about,” she said. “But it’s not something that I’m going to keep doing. I need to preserve my mind.”
According to the Olivers, within a few weeks of The Final Exam becoming available as a free download on Steam, it had accrued a quarter of a million downloads. Tens of thousands more have watched videos of others playing it on YouTube and other streaming platforms. Not all players have been supportive. “[It] is ultimately far too focused on the 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.”
The Final Exam’s game play is undeniably crude, but the game play is not the point. As a piece of educational software, its provocation deepens its effect. Another Steam reviewer called it possibly “the scariest game I’ve ever played,” a chance for “adults to feel what some students experience every year,” in a way entirely different from watching the news. And, considering the subject matter, the game is respectfully produced. If the shooter apprehends you, the screen turns red and displays one of several sobering messages about the number of students killed in various U.S. school shootings. If you manage to escape into the sunlight, you hear the ringing of the school bell; the screen shows no congratulatory message, just a bleak assertion that fifteen thousand students experience school shootings in America each 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 forthcoming games. At one point, she had the opportunity to watch attendees play The Final Exam. It was a surreal moment. She saw teen-age boys, some of whom were a similar age to Joaquin, writhing in discomfort, at times letting out yelps, as they role-played a re-creation of her son’s final moments. “I felt an ache in my heart,” Patricia told me. “I couldn’t help but imagine these kids carrying that fear into their lives, wondering if their schools were safe. It was painful to witness, but strengthened my soul to keep sharing Joaquin’s story.” ♦
