Threats & Trade-offs: A Start-up Simulation Game for Cybersecurity and Innovation Decision-Making

Kseniya Stsiampkouskaya; Oishee Kundu; Joanna Syrda; Adam Joinson

doi:10.1007/s10796-025-10604-3

Threats & Trade-offs: A Start-up Simulation Game for Cybersecurity and Innovation Decision-Making

Kseniya Stsiampkouskaya, Oishee Kundu, Joanna Syrda, Adam Joinson

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Cybersecurity is now critically important in an increasingly digitized and connected world. In addition to required digital security, individuals and organisations pursue multiple other objectives under binding resource constraints. Understanding how they make decisions in the face of these trade-offs is important for both research and teaching purposes. Games can create effective and exciting learning environments and also provide an immersive and experiment-based research setting to understand decision-making. We present a novel tabletop board game which sets cybersecurity in a broader organisational context and emulates real life business decisions. It can be used as a powerful research tool to understand decision-making about cybersecurity in a resource-constrained and uncertain environment. It is also a useful interdisciplinary educational tool, integrating concepts from cybersecurity, business development, and innovation management in gameplay.

Original language	English
Journal	Information Systems Frontiers
Early online date	22 Apr 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-025-10604-3
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 22 Apr 2025

Data Availability Statement

Playtest data and study materials are available on request from the corresponding author. Game materials are available for download on https://www.discribehub.org/boardgame-threats-tradeoffs.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following game masters for assisting us with the playtest study: Dr Irene Anthi, Dr Johrine Cronjé, Emily Godwin, Vasilis Ieropoulos, Dr Amir Javed, Johnny Swierczynski, Abubakar Mohammed, and Dr Tobias Weickert. We would also like to thank Dr Lowri Williams for assisting us with organising the playtest study. Additionally, we would like to thank Firehaus Brand Consultancy for producing the final board game designs. Finally, we would like to thank three anonymous Reviewers and Coordinating Editor Dr Philip Menard for their valuable feedback and suggestions that helped us improve our article.

Funding

Economic and Social Research Council: ES/ V 003666/1

Funders	Funder number
Economic and Social Research Council

Access to Document

10.1007/s10796-025-10604-3Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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Threats & Trade-offs: A Start-up Simulation Game for Cybersecurity and Innovation Decision-Making

Abstract

Data Availability Statement

Acknowledgements

Funding

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