C.A.L.Y.P.S.O.: Designing Gameplay Features for Improving Player's Cybersecurity Self-Efficacy
Isadora Krsek, Shuyang Chen, Sauvik Das, Jason Hong, Laura Dabbish · 2024
Cybersecurity campaigns often fail because tools and practices, like password managers, appear too daunting or difficult to implement. While prior work has shown that transformational game design approaches to improving players’ security self-efficacy can show promise in encouraging more secure behaviors in players, we still lack a systematic understanding of how and why these features work, or how these approaches differ in their impact on players’ behavior change. This paper presents and describes the design and implementation of a transformational game called C.A.L.Y.P.S.O., incorporating 12 dynamically toggle-able design patterns inspired by Bandura’s principles for self-efficacy design [7] in order to encourage users’ adoption of expert-recommended cybersecurity tools and best practices. These 12 design patterns consist of self-efficacy design features explored in other work [9], and other techniques of the authors’ own design. The goal of this work is to draw on psychological theories of self-efficacy to develop design patterns that can be translated to other contexts to enhance end-user cybersecurity behaviors and to build a game that will enable researchers to assess the effectiveness of these design patterns in comparison to one another.