Design of a Serious Game for Cybersecurity Ethics Training

"Design of a Serious Game for Cybersecurity Ethics Training" presents the design rationale and development of "Prescott & Krueger," a serious game intended to train IT students in ethical reasoning within cybersecurity contexts. The work is grounded in the Four Component Model of moral intelligence (moral focus, sensitivity, judgement, and action) and the Morality Play framework, and it operationalizes a five-principle principlist ethical framework comprising beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, and explicability. The authors translate these theoretical components into concrete learning outcomes, positioning the game as a tool for developing applied moral reasoning among future practitioners rather than as a purely abstract ethics exercise.

The design process was informed by an audience study of 110 usable responses from undergraduate cybersecurity students at a Sydney university. Its results were used to construct three player personas, each reflecting distinct gaming habits, motivations, and gender patterns. The game places the player in the role of Lead Security Analyst at a fictional firm, using branching narratives and resource-management systems to present ethical dilemmas. A deliberate gender-neutral player character is included as a design choice that the authors flag for validation through playtesting.

The authors report that the 4CM proved valuable for generating specific, assessable learning outcomes. The more prescriptive Morality Play model, by contrast, proved difficult to implement, owing to resource constraints and the challenge of providing meaningful non-player character moral feedback on fine-grained player actions. Planned features include a periodic reflection mechanic and multi-episode scenarios with callbacks to earlier decisions. The current prototype is a single 30-minute episode undergoing external playtesting, and experimental evaluation of learning outcomes has not yet been completed. The authors conclude that reconciling domain fidelity with the need for robust moral feedback remains an unresolved challenge in serious moral game design.