Video games: your power-ups for cybersecurity awareness

Learning with video games

In previous articles we have already talked about the advantages of video games as educational tools: they let users experiment and make mistakes in a highly motivating, danger-free environment.

In the cybersecurity field, video games are a tool that can be greatly leveraged for end-user awareness. Their use has been shown to result in an increase of safe habits.

Gupi’s Adventures

Gupi’s Adventures is a series of video games released by SMARTFENSE, in which a fish named Gupi, our main character, faces different challenges in the stormy sea of information security.

The end user is honored with the responsibility of guiding Gupi’s actions and decisions, helping him reach the end of his adventure without suffering an incident.

But the user will not be alone: a wise fish offers useful advice when the challenges seem to have no solution.

Avoiding the hook

The first installment of Gupi’s Adventures places our main character in a sea full of jellyfish, his favorite dish.

By tapping on them, Gupi swims closer to eat them, but before he does, the jellyfish will show a URL and it will be our task to classify them as safe or unsafe. If we make the right decision, Gupi happily eats the jellyfish, but if we get it wrong, he will bite a hook and get caught!

Does Gupi help raise awareness?

To advance through the different rounds of the video game, it will be necessary to learn to identify suspicious or fraudulent URLs.

But the player will not only be learning: they will be part of an epic adventure, Gupi’s journey to learn to fend for himself. The player will identify with the character, share his quest and grow with him.

Unlike real-world contexts, which are often hard to dive into, Gupi’s Adventures: Avoiding the Hook motivates the user to take part much more intensely and provides abundant feedback that boosts their learning and makes them aware of their own achievements.

Time to play!

The Beta version of Gupi’s Adventures: Avoiding the Hook recently opened to the public. You can play it at https://gupi-adventures.smartfense.com.

We invite you to dive in with Gupi and to share the video game with your users!

Will you make it to the end of the adventure?