TrendVideo games as a training tool for first responders

Leaving aside the debate over whether video games improve or diminish the intellectual capacities of the youngsters who play them, these games can serve more serious purposes. Government Technology’s Hilton Collins writes that the U.S. video game market is booming. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that consumer spending for console and handheld games will reach $11.7 billion in 2012, a noticeable increase over the $8.6 billion in 2007 the firm recorded.

There is a small niche within this booming market dedicated to games whose chief goal is training and educating rather than entertaining. For example, TruSim, a division of Blitz Games Studios in the United Kingdom, develops serious games for the growing market of training simulations for the health-care, military, and corporate arenas. The developer’s latest innovation is Interactive Triage Trainer, a prototype designed to train first responders on how to prioritize casualties after a catastrophe. A game play video reveals that players are transported to a city street which has been ravaged by a bomb blast. Collins writes that you can tell it is just a game, but the graphics are realistic enough to inform the user that this playing experience is an impressively three-dimensional rendered affair which is on par with much of what is available for the current generation of home video game consoles.

Players are engaged in various triage actions, tagging the casualties based on who needs care the most. They can label a casualty priority 1, immediate; priority 2, urgent; priority 3, delayed; or priority 4, deceased. The game scores players’ decisions after they have tagged all casualties, informing them whether their actions were correct for each casualty addressed.