MOTENS: A Pedagogical Design Model for Serious Cyber Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces MOTENS, a pedagogical model for designing serious cyber games that integrates cognitive principles and game mechanics to enhance cybersecurity education effectiveness.

Contribution

It presents a novel pedagogical framework, MOTENS, addressing gaps in existing models and guiding the design of serious cyber games with a structured, stage-based approach.

Findings

MOTENS effectively guides serious cyber game design.

The model improves alignment with learning objectives.

Application to Riskio demonstrates practical utility.

Abstract

In the last few years, serious games have become popular, with a consensus of the benefits for teaching cyber security awareness and education. However, there is still a lack of pedagogical driven methodologies and tools to support serious games design to ensure they achieve the learning objectives. This paper proposes MOTENS, a pedagogical model, to design serious cyber games based on the gaps we identified in the current games design models and the lessons learnt from creating a serious tabletop game called Riskio, designed to teach cyber security awareness and education. The MOTENS model has six high-level components. Five components are linked to the games/design mechanics, and one component, `Theory', that supports the design's cognitive principles, including players' motivation. The model is used to design serious cyber games and goes through five stages, from identifying and segmenting target players, steps to creating game mechanics linked to pedagogy instruction and then to testing to create a serious game that is designed to achieve the games learning objectives.