Designing a Game to Promote Equity in Cybersecurity

This paper presents the design and early playtesting of HEX of the Turtle Islands, a 2D isometric adventure game intended to introduce underrepresented youth to cybersecurity concepts through narrative and puzzle-based play. The authors argue that cybersecurity's workforce diversity problem stems in part from its typical position as a late-stage, capstone topic in computer science higher education, and that informal, game-based learning can build novice identities and self-efficacy earlier. They note that prior cybersecurity games often use the subject superficially or, when conceptually accurate, reproduce a narrow professional stereotype with limited avatar and character diversity.

The game is organized around three design principles: multiple intertwined narratives (a rescue plot, an ecological storyline, and a corporate conspiracy) that serve as hooks for diverse players; authentic cybersecurity and computational thinking puzzles covering ciphers, logic, pathing, and modular arithmetic; and exploration as the mechanism linking narrative and puzzles. Findings are drawn from iterative playtesting with 31 participants aged 10 to 16, recruited in public libraries and online, with sessions averaging about 45 minutes and analyzed through an interpretive grounded theory approach with consensus coding.

Preliminary findings suggest that multiple narrative hooks engaged players with differing interests, and that embedding puzzle rules in in-world collectibles reduced player frustration with a logic puzzle that had initially relied on dense written instructions. Exploration proved a persistent design tension: players with less gaming experience found open levels frustrating, while more experienced players enjoyed them. The authors are explicit that the study is small-scale, qualitative, and design-stage, so they make no claims about learning or affective outcomes, and plan larger rollouts and further demographic analysis.