VMEET: A serious game for teaching ethical viewpoints to cybersecurity professionals

Ethics training, particularly relating to the use of computer systems, is becoming increasingly important to ensure the common good for all. To provide safe training, we propose the use of a serious-game populated with conversational agents that implement the Four Component model of ethical decision-making to provide tailored ethics training to users. We enable the players to engage in critical thinking regarding their perspective by providing alternative viewpoints by agents having their own persona, including ethical priorities and personality, shown to be a key factor in ethical decision-making. This paper reports our study involving 304 cybersecurity students. Results show that after playing our cyber-ethics game, there was an increase in the number of students who recognized an ethical issue. We examined whether players could correctly identify the agents’ personalities and ethical principle priorities and found that personality could be identified, but all agents were scored highly on all ethical principles.