Serious games for serious jobs: enhancing law enforcement and militaries
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There are perhaps no jobs more serious than those concerned with law enforcement and militaries. Frontline police officers and soldiers in particular face incredibly dangerous, even life threatening situations in their day to day duties. Whether they’re fighting in a warzone, or attempting to pursue a dangerous suspect, lives are on the line, and there is no substitute for experience. At the higher echelons of law enforcement agencies and military complexes, and all the way through the chains of command, sit leaders whose decision making can positively or negatively affect both their own personnel, and also the environments and communities in which they operate.
It’s for these factors that serious games – games designed with serious purposes other than for entertainment – are perhaps best suited as training tools for uniformed authorities. Afterall, modern serious games have their origin in the United States military, where researcher Clark C Abt coined the term in his 1970s book, Serious Games – he would go on to develop numerous serious games for military training. The ability to simulate environments that are dangerous in real life allows participants to gain experience without risking their lives.
How law enforcement can use serious games
There are a number of ways that law enforcement agencies and police forces can use serious online games to enhance their operations. For a start they can make for a very effective recruitment tool. Online serious games could not only generate interest among applicants through engaging game play, but allow recruiters to identify talented individuals, or those with the correct temperaments to succeed within their organisation. Through thoughtful serious game development, interactive learning experiences can be created to cover nearly all aspects of a police officer’s training, as well as training law enforcement support staff, and even in leadership development.
For police officers and law enforcement agents
Working as a police officer or a law enforcement agent requires a well developed set of soft skills to succeed. You need to have the interpersonal skills to de-escalate volatile situations and effectively communicate with every cross section of your community. You need critical thinking skills to make quick judgements in stressful conditions, the situational awareness to secure buildings, public areas, and crime scenes, the physical ability to handle conflict, and the fitness to chase down and capture fleeing suspects. On top of all this, you need to know the law and how to apply it to almost every situation. This is a difficult and serious job, and it requires serious training solutions.
Nearly every aspect of being a front line law enforcement officer is based on applying the previously mentioned list of abilities. There are variations in the scenarios, variations in which parts of the law to apply, and other minutiae, but fundamentally, repeatability is the key. It would be very easy to utilise the Dynamic Path™ format on the Drimify platform to target the development of all the relevant skills, mixed in with reinforcing learnings of police-specific codes and procedures. It gives you access to every game engine, allowing you to make a tailored training pathway for recruits and trainees. Customised Quizzes could pose scenarios with multiple choice, ordered or open answer options, depending on how challenging you were looking to make the experience, and mini games could be added, tailored to reinforce learnings and adding some variety to the format.
Contrary to TV and movies, the law is not Dirty Harry and Vic Mackey decommissioning hardened criminals by any means necessary. The law and its enforcement is a pillar of modern society. To operate effectively, it needs as few mavericks as possible, and every team member operating by the same rule book. The results come from following the regulations, not in spite of them. In fact, the very rule of law in most developed countries discounts results that are brought about when the rules are violated. Providing trainee officers or agents with playable, repeatable learning experiences to reinforce best practice is one way to safeguard against these rules being broken.
To train support staff
Effective enforcement of the law also relies upon a lot more than just police officers and agents. Like any specialist organisation, to operate effectively requires their own infrastructure of support staff. For many, such as cleaners and IT technicians, this might not be any different from working in any other industry. However, for telephone operators, and anybody dealing with the public, representing the law can completely change the nature of their position.
For example, emergency service operators are working under a very different set of circumstances than say, telephone operatives working in banking. In addition to irregular working hours, emergency service operators are taking almost exclusively calls from distressed members of the public. If you dial 999 or 911, it’s never lightly or on the off chance. You or someone near you needs help. Emergency service operators need to be able to effectively prioritise calls, take the necessary information, and direct either police, or the ambulance or the fire service to save the day. These are the conductors. Without them, there is no symphony.
In most call centres, training takes place with an experienced member of staff listening in, there to guide, and potentially take over if the issue is too complicated or challenging. In a real life 999 call, every second counts. If you call the police because someone is attacking your house, you don’t want to hear the operator tell you it’s their first day and they need a minute to check with their supervisor. This is an area where perhaps even more than frontline officers who work with partners, you need to be fully functional from day one. A serious online game structured around the different calls they’re likely to receive, how to respond to them, what information to take, and how to refer it to the right service or department can go a long way to helping them prepare as part of a broader e-learning course. A serious game gives them repeatability through simulated experience, allows you to monitor their progress, and assess their readiness for action.
For educating the public, and public relations
We mentioned earlier that law enforcement was a pillar of modern society. Well, it doesn’t take an architect to tell you that pillars don’t work in isolation. An essential component of effective law enforcement is cooperation with the general public. When the public respects and trusts the police, and understands how they operate, it gives law enforcement agencies infinite allies, and allows them to be far more effective.
With this in mind, serious games can be used to educate the public on new laws coming into effect, and even police incentives or actions that may be going on in their area. For example, if training exercises were to be taking place in a very publicly visible environment, an interactive game that explains why it’s happening, and what it’s all about, could be a really engaging way to let local residents know, so they’re not alarmed by seeing masses of uniformed officers in their neighbourhood. It could invite players to assume the role of a police officer or an agent, and have them run through simulations of some of the scenarios the trained personnel would be tackling. It could even prove to be an effective recruiting tool, potentially sparking interest in younger players who find the scenarios engaging, and as such see law enforcement as an attractive career path.
How militaries have used games in training
Similar to law enforcement agencies, militaries also benefit massively from serious games. Infact, the history of serious games is built on war games, used to simulate battlefield strategies for centuries, and some of the first modern serious games were developed for training military officers during the Cold War.
Serious games, applied to the military, can be used to similar effects as they can in law enforcement agencies, to train soldiers and officers on how to best handle particular combat scenarios as well as for recruitment. Because of the sheer breadth of what constitutes a modern army, with an air force, an army, a navy, various special forces, and in the case of the US, even a space force, there are no limits to the number of highly specialised and extremely dangerous environments and scenarios that need to be effectively simulated to comprehensively prepare personnel.
In addition to customising serious games that can run personnel through theory and critical thinking, the military represents especially fertile ground for serious games involving virtual reality and augmented reality, given the physical and highly skilled nature of certain positions and branches.
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