Engagement and Players' Intended Behaviors in a Cybersecurity Serious Game

Introduction

The use of serious games for non-entertainment and ‘serious’ purposes (e.g., education or training) is rather common in today’s learning. Serious games are particularly successful because they make great use of computing technology to enhance inherent interaction features, such as personal communication, narratives, simulations, and just-in-time feedback to players’ in-game choices (Grossard et al., 2017, Baranowski et al., 2016). These games provide a safe and inexpensive platform for learners to experience authentic learning and motivate and help them become more engaged in the learning activities (Ferguson & Colwell, 2018; All et al., 2016; Barnes et al., 2008). Players’ experience and motivation can be enhanced through user-centric authentic activities (e.g., examining objects through exploration, self-discovery, and problem-solving) via a series of scenarios with complex tasks (Serrano-Laguna et al., 2017; Baggio & Beldarrain, 2011). Enjoyable play experiences are key to developing strategic thinking in the learners (Bogost, 2021; Greitzer et al., 2007). Even non-technical audiences (such as minority and female groups) have learned and benefited from using serious games (Poster, 2018; Adams & Makramalla, 2015).

Bouvier et al. (2014) defined engagement in serious games as “the willingness to have emotions, affects, and thoughts directed toward and aroused by the mediated activity to achieve a specific objective” (p. 7). When serious game activities connect with the players’ perceptual, intellectual, or interactive anticipations, they can impact players’ emotions and thoughts. This, in turn, results in the players feeling engaged beyond the activities themselves and continuing to feel engaged even after the activities have ended (Hamari et al., 2016; Alrashidi et al., 2016). In addition, players’ information processing abilities can often be enhanced through increased persuasion, attitude change, and awareness (Muhamad & Kim, 2020; Gass & Seiter, 2018). The enhanced information processing abilities make serious games useful in many areas, from a training tool for tactical and operational warfare in the military (Samčović, 2018), to persuading for ‘behavioral and/or attitudinal change’ in learning. Examples of behavioral change include the promotion of better health (Vlachopoulos & Makri, 2017; Boyle et al., 2016), prevention of diseases (Wiemeyer & Tremper, 2017) and substance abuse (Willmott et al., 2019), and even cybersecurity (Herr & Allen, 2015), which deals with awareness and prevention of fraudulent activities.

The paper proceeds as follows: First, we discuss the motivation and conceptual framework of the study. After that, we describe the data collection methods and research material. Then, present the study's results and findings, and finally, identify the study’s limitations.

Motivation

Since cybersecurity (serious) games are created to increase end-user awareness and persuade them to refrain from ‘behaviors’ that could lead to security threats (Herr & Allen, 2015), an important topic for research would appear to be the influence on behavior and attitude changes from cybersecurity games to increase engagement. Interestingly, literature reviews identified that the studies on cybersecurity game effectiveness remained limited (Bada et al., 2019; Boyle et al., 2016) and that there are problems with many of the training games. Challenges facing these serious games include research gaps from: