It's crazy that there are no well-known first-person SAR games
I recently had a conversation with some friends about whether they could think of any first person search-and-rescue games where the player plays a SAR tech, medic, ski patroller, missing-person search party member, etc. and completes emergency rescue missions. None of us could think of a single one!
This is fucking nuts, to me. The genre of first-person, helmet-mounted GoPro search-and-rescue YouTube videos is gigantic. These disaster rescue videos regularly get hundreds of thousands or occasionally even millions of views. SAR work is inherently videogamey, it's exciting, it's action-movie type shit, and it's clearly something that a lot of people love to learn about. However, most SAR-themed games are primarily vehicle games. One of the bigger ones on Steam, Stormworks, has first person gameplay... but it's primarily about the fantasy of designing vehicles for use in vehicle-centric rescue missions.
I could sit around and guess for hours about why strictly medic/SAR games don't get made. There are a lot of very strong theories to compare, and they're all pretty good. Our culture valorizes violence and conflict, which might make some of these games seem like "less cool" versions of similar games where the player fights and kills enemies. Medic work is also extremely difficult and detail-rich, and any game representing even a very simplified version of the work would need so many interlocking minigames and systems. Finally, making SAR games that are only about driving vehicles gets you more than half of the way to the fantasy, for many people, and they're probably easier to fund. I am sure there are a ton of other theories I could put forward. These reasons probably all contribute.
But... I don't think that first-person search-and-rescue medic games would be that hard to fund or make compared to many other sim games! In fact, I think there's a lot of good data out there that could bolster a publisher pitch for a game in this genre. So consider this me begging for someone to make one!
Here are some of the better SAR/medic videos I've watched in the last few weeks. Each one of these feels like an entire videogame. Each video has mechanics in it. I feel kind of crazy that there aren't whole genres of modern first-person rescue games about these kinds of SAR operations. (I stumbled into the genre because I was looking for videos of people getting lowered from helicopters on wires and now Youtube just shows me tons and tons of extremely long SAR/helicopter rescue videos??) Anyway:
A deranged cliffside helicopter rescue in California:
From the same account as above: rescuing an injured horse with a helicopter:
Here is a fascinating 90-minute video from the perspective of a guy breaking his femur and being saved by a chipper ski patroller in Banff. He's disabled embedding on this video so you'll have to follow this link.
This next video is from an extremely popular account by a guy who assists with SAR efforts in Taiwan by searching mountain trails for lost hikers. This and other videos from this account contain screenshots of an app which he uses to analyze last-known-cell-tower data. Those screenshots suggest entire gameplay mechanics someone could whack into a videogame:
Anyway, I'm not the right person to make this game, but if you're looking for someone to design a radio chatter system for a game like this, I've watched dozens of these videos, and I have ideas...