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Cybersecurity vulnerabilities are often due to human users acting according to their own ethical priorities. With the goal of providing tailored training to cybersecurity professionals, the authors conducted a study to uncover profiles of human factors that influence which ethical principles are valued highest following exposure to ethical dilemmas presented in a cybersecurity game.

The authors’ game first sensitises players (cybersecurity trainees) to five cybersecurity ethical principles (beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, autonomy and explicability) and then allows the player to explore their application in multiple cybersecurity scenarios. After playing the game, players rank the five ethical principles in terms of importance. A total of 250 first-year cybersecurity students played the game. To develop profiles, the authors collected players' demographics, knowledge about ethics, personality, moral stance and values.

The authors built models to predict the importance of each of the five ethical principles. The analyses show that, generally, the main driver influencing the priority given to specific ethical principles is cultural background, followed by the personality traits of extraversion and conscientiousness. The importance of the ingroup was also a prominent factor.

Cybersecurity professionals need to understand the impact of users' ethical choices. To provide ethics training, the profiles uncovered will be used to build artificially intelligent (AI) non-player characters (NPCs) to expose the player to multiple viewpoints. The NPCs will adapt their training according to the predicted players’ viewpoint.

This study uses a critically acclaimed digital game as an instructional tool to explore the role of emotional design elements on psychological flow and perceived learning.

The authors employ transportation theory to generate a set of antecedents of psychological flow and the theory of flow to connect the gaming experience to positive learning outcomes. The authors investigate the subjective learning experience of players with the use of a psychometric survey, and the authors employ structural equation modelling (SEM) to unearth the direct as well as the indirect effects amongst narrative, aesthetics, flow and learning outcomes.

The findings of this study demonstrate that narrative and aesthetics in serious games positively influence the perceived learning by facilitating a state of psychological flow.

This study contributes to better understanding and theorizing the role of narrative and aesthetics on learning outcomes in the context of serious games.

The findings of this study bear valuable implications for the design of serious games as they highlight the importance of elements often disregarded as not directly related to the learning process and are typically absent from the design of serious games.

Prior studies have identified aesthetics and narratives as design elements that contribute to the perceived enjoyment of a game; this study empirically investigates the role of narratives and aesthetics in enhancing perceived learning through psychological flow.