A Challenge of Developing Serious Games to Raise the Awareness of Cybersecurity Issues

Abstract

One of the Japanese Government Reports says that there are about 265,000 persons in charge of cyber securities in our country, but we need to raise more 80,000 persons. In order to solve this problem, many companies and schools are providing educational programs, but lecture types of learning is not enough effective since the methods and techniques of cyber attacks drastically grow day by day. Therefore, our proposal is to introduce “Serious Games”, and here are three reasons to support it. One reason is that since games are attractive to many persons in Japan, they would be good learning materials to keep their motivation. The other reason is that games are good method of simulation based learning and training for dynamically changing cyber security issues. The last reason is that computer games are the good platform to perceive the learning activities of person, and to continuously update educational materials by updating software contents. With this aim in mind, on April 2014, we have organized an Executive Committee (ExCom) of Serious Game Jam (SGJ) consisting of members from academia and industry. A Game Jam is known as an effective method to develop prototypes of game in a short term, and about 60 university students who are majoring in computer science or game developing attended to the Serious Game Jam for Cyber Security (SGJ#2). They have proposed 42 games, and 6 were developed in two days. Out of those 6 games, 3 games have been tuned after the SGJ, and we have evaluated 3 games in three experiments by 152 (take#1: 61, take#2: 23, take#3:68) university students. Through those experiments, we have confirmed the effectiveness of serious game for cyber security education, and also obtained the implication of future possibilities. In this paper, an overall activity of this challenge, experiments, results and lessons learned are described.