The Exiled Prince: a human-centered digital game for promoting cybersecurity awareness and engagement among non-CS university students in Bangladesh

Abstract

With the growing use of digital devices in Bangladesh, cybersecurity risks such as phishing, malware and data breaches have become increasingly common especially among the non-CS background university students in Bangladesh who often lack both awareness and motivation to learn about online safety. Existing cybersecurity training tools mostly target professionals or computer science students, leaving a gap for accessible and engaging approaches for non-technical university students. To address this, our research applied Human-Centered Design (HCD) principles along with the Octalysis Gamification Framework to develop an interactive visual-novel game called “The Exiled Prince” which presents real-world cybersecurity threats through storytelling, decision making and in game quizzes to create an enjoyable learning experience. A controlled study was conducted with two groups where one group is the control group (n = 20) using a traditional tutorial and another group is the experimental group (n = 20) who played the game to measure effectiveness. The game group demonstrated higher engagement, stronger awareness and better knowledge retention compared to the control group. This study contributes to a Human-Centered gamified learning model designed for non-CS university students, demonstrating that game-based learning can make cybersecurity education both effective and enjoyable.