Serious Games for IT-Security Education

Abstract

In recent years, the notion of gamification has gained some interest within the scientific community. Gamification denotes the use of typical gaming mechanisms, like collecting points, reaching different levels or gaining a spot on a highscore list, in a non-gaming related context. One of the most important application areas of gamification is education, e. g. learning a foreign language or basic arithmetics. There have been, however, few attempts to use games for IT-Security education.

The present paper will review the existing approaches in this area, present a serious game that has been produced at Stuttgart Media University on behalf of the swiss bank UBS, and will provide an outlook on planned further activities in this area.