Transform Your Digital and AI Projects' Risks into Fun-filled Challenges
Privacy training often struggles to captivate employees, due to its reputation as dull, repetitive, and irrelevant. A growing trend aims to rectify this by gamifying training programs, making them more engaging and easier for employees to absorb and apply.
Jacqueline DiChiara, the GRC, Ethics & Compliance Editor at eLearning Industry, advocates for incorporating fun, authenticity, and interactivity into training, especially in small, manageable chunks. She highlights the success of immersive shows, games, and stories in sparking active thinking and learning.
Gamification's power lies in its ability to make abstract concepts accessible and foster critical thinking via game mechanics. While extrinsic motivators such as leaderboards, points, and badges play a role, the core of their effectiveness is their use in inspiring collaborative creativity and critical thinking.
Michael Novack, a security architect and board game enthusiast, shuns the term "gamification," seeing it as treating fun as a secondary addition to boring training. Instead, he emphasizes prioritizing fun, producing games that appeal to a wide audience and can challenge non-technical employees during family game nights. Among his creations, "Byte Club" and "Fuzzy Logic" have been popular with participants of DPD25Fest.
BSides Ottawa, a global event driven by the infosec community, has integrated playful learning into its conferences, offering activities such as Capture the Flag competitions, escape rooms, and interactive workshops. Jarett Parent, the Lead Organizer and Board Chair, notes that these activities often draw in new participants, transforming complex concepts into more accessible and engaging experiences.
The grassroots movement in cybersecurity, privacy, and AI has developed serious games and events to encourage people around the world to build necessary skills and mindsets. Game development communities in these fields hold events and competitions to help individuals tackle evolving threats, with Privacy Village's DPDFest as a prominent example.
Serious games utilize play to explain technical ideas and foster a mindset that translates learning to the real world. They utilize both intrinsic motivators, like discovering new strategies and contending with challenging situations, and extrinsic ones, such as offer points, badges, and competitive leaderboards.
Play-based learning is not limited to technology-focused fields. Other industries, such as education, have successfully harnessed the power of play to teach essential skills in an engaging manner.
Adam Shostack, a renowned expert in threat modeling, maintains a list of security and privacy games, featuring titles like "Elevation of Privilege," "Control-Alt-Hack," and "Data Heist." Online platforms like Hack the Box, Try Hack Me, and Antisyphon offer micro-modules and games, allowing users to test their skills in incident response, ethical hacking, and other cybersecurity topics.
Privacy Village, for example, has an online game platform called Compliance Detective, which users can access year-round and is highly encouraged during DPDFest.
Play-based learning and gamification have proven successful in various fields, from cybersecurity to AI. By incorporating elements like interactive exercises, storytelling, and user-centered design, organizations can create dynamic, engaging, and memorable training experiences that improve employee retention and skill development in privacy and cybersecurity.
The effectiveness of gamification lies in its capacity to simplify complex concepts like data privacy through interactive and engaging methods. Big data analytics can benefit from gamified training programs, encouraging critical thinking and fostering a deeper understanding of technical concepts.
