Innovation potential

Serious game (product)

Serious games date back the second half of the 20th century (Abt, 1970), with main focus on military uses. Today, serious games present a great pedagogic potential for awareness, teaching and training, as evidenced by the large number of industrial cases and solutions. Besides, most serious games, including simulations, are far more complex than traditional entertaining games and in order to provide a fun and appealing experience to learners, they use storytelling to appeal to emotions. In the field of information assurance and cyber security, we can find several serious games used for educational and training purposes (Amorim et al. 2013), such as CyberCIEGE (where the player has to operate and defend a computer network), Data Security (where the player plays the role of a new employee tasked to identify security concerns).

RAYUELA’s serious game will be a multiplatform and multi-language Unity game with Interactive storylines. RAYUELA’s serious game will be able to offer an immersive experience to young players, educating them on the importance of keeping safe online and acting as an enabler and amplifier of the preliminary findings on potential victims and offenders, in order to extract quality data to feed RAYUELA’s algorithms for detailed profiling and pattern identification.

Added value

RAYUELAs add value in this area:

  1. educate and raise awareness on cybercrime
  2. target specific vulnerable group (youth)
  3. fully integrated gaming environment of all storylines
  4. multi-platform serious game
  5. conduct an extensive analysis and vulnerability tests on most used devices among children and young adults
  6. player – youth and children will learn not only from their actions but also their mindset and decisions in the game
  7. collaboration with LEAs from the very beginning

Methodology (data)

RAYUELA aims to understand the current threats to children and young people to design and develop the most suitable serious game. This effort will be further expanded on by not only considering in-game data, but also accounting for how players interact with the game.

RAYUELA’s multidisciplinary research framework: The project will work towards the creation of an extensive compendium of RAYUELA’s research tools, findings, interview reports and standard profiles, as part of the serious game design roadmap.

RAYUELA’s guidelines for pilot studies: As a result of RAYUELA’s pilot studies in a supervised environment, the project will compile a series of surveillance KPIs, insights and recommendations on the design, deployment, and operation of RAYUELA’s supervised testing environments.

RAYUELA’s best practices and policy briefs on cybercrime: To foster prevention and awareness, the consortium will prepare several policy briefs following the project’s results, to be shared with relevant EU institutions, policy makers and LEAs in order to effectively influence the cybercrime policy cycle.

RAYUELA’s strategy on online privacy, ethics and GDPR: RAYUELA will elaborate a comprehensive roadmap for ethics, data security and privacy protection to offer guidance and monitoring of all necessary mechanisms to maximize RAYUELA’s compliance with EU directives, guarantee full anonymity and privacy and ensure consent and acknowledgement of all minors participating in RAYUELA’s pilot studies and interacting with the game itself.

RAYUELA’s profiling and behavioural models: RAYUELA’s ML/AI data analysis algorithms and profiling methodology based on Bayesian Multilevel Regression and Poststratification methods. Dedicated APIs for anonymisation and aggregation of players data.