Design and Execution Challenges for Cybersecurity Serious Games: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews the design and implementation challenges of cybersecurity serious games, highlighting their educational benefits and the difficulties in assessing their real-world and long-term impacts.

Contribution

It provides an overview of key challenges in designing and evaluating cybersecurity serious games based on literature and practical experience.

Findings

Serious games effectively educate users and are engaging.

Challenges exist in measuring real-life effects of these games.

Long-term impact assessment remains difficult.

Abstract

Serious games are increasingly being used in cybersecurity education to engage and educate users. Several studies with cybersecurity serious games have shown that they are successful in educating users and the users also find them both fun and engaging. Meanwhile, several studies have also reported issues in identifying real life effects of the game and even the long-term effects that they have. Based on our experience with enterprise cybersecurity games and games from recent literature, we discuss a few key challenges that must be considered while designing and evaluating serious games for cybersecurity awareness.