Serious Games for Cyber Security A New General Design Framework

In a context where cyber strategies developed by nations across the world are looking for more innovative ways of raising the awareness of the general population, serious games appear to be a promising solution to the task. However, only a small portion of serious games in this field are designed with this goal in mind, and several studies on the pedagogical effectiveness of serious games highlight a large proportion of simulation based games. Considering the potential virtues of serious games and games in general, the aforementioned observations raise questions about the design process of serious games and over representation of simulation based serious games. To this end, this thesis explores the design of serious games and proposes a framework to help building serious games of all types of genres, not specifically simulation based games. This proposed framework specifically emphasises the relationship between learning objectives and game mechanics, providing a way to combine them in a suitable manner depending on the overall pedagogic goal, or game being created. An experimental protocol is described, discussed and refinements for new experiments are presented. Nevertheless, the proposed framework represents a foundation piece for future work; in particular it constitutes an important part of a larger solution to evaluate the effectiveness and perceived quality of serious games.