Towards Accessible and Inclusive Serious Games for Cybersecurity

Pape, S.; Quintanar, A. and Beckers, K.

In Serious Games - 11th Joint International Conference, JCSG 2025, Lucerne, Switzerland, December 4-5, 2025, Proceedings, pages 97-112, LNCS , 2025.

Abstract

Inclusiveness and accessibility are important properties to allow everyone to participate in today's society. However, these properties have an even higher importance in the context of security and social engineering as disabled and discriminated persons often additionally struggle with depleted resources and capabilities, and therefore are particularly vulnerable. On the other hand, we found that inclusiveness and accessibility are often neglected when it comes to serious games for security training or awareness. Therefore, we investigated how gender inclusiveness to avoid typical stereotypes, language inclusiveness to improve accessibility and features to ease the participation of visually impaired players could be integrated in the already existing games HATCH and PROTECT. We found that the invested effort in accessibility greatly improved the overall user experience and gender-inclusiveness had a positive impact on the players' creativity.

PDFDOILinkLinkLinkLinkBibtexsecurityhuman factorsserious gamesocial engineeringcybersecprohatchphoeni2x

Bibtex

@InProceedings{PQB25jcsg,
  author    = {Sebastian Pape and Alejandro Quintanar and Kristian Beckers},
  title     = {Towards Accessible and Inclusive Serious Games for Cybersecurity},
  booktitle = {Serious Games - 11th Joint International Conference, {JCSG} 2025, Lucerne, Switzerland, December 4-5, 2025, Proceedings},
  year      = {2025},
  series    = {LNCS},
  pages     = {97--112},
  month     = {12},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-032-10518-9_9},
  keywords  = {serious game, PHOENI2X, cybersecpro, human Factors, social engineering,security,HATCH,PROTECT},
  url       = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-10518-9\_9},
}

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