Paper short abstract:

My paper focuses on the gamification of cybersecurity as an epistemological shift in the organization of trust in digital technologies. It describes how this has paved the way for new aesthetic practices and politics in the field of IT security and for digital culture in general.

Paper long abstract:

My paper focuses on the gamification of cybersecurity as an epistemological shift in the organization of trust in digital technologies. It describes how this has paved the way for new aesthetic practices and politics in the field of IT security. Within the cybersecurity industry, digital trust has long been treated as a problem to be solved by heavily fortifying digital technology. The ubiquity of digital networks, security breaches, and state-sponsored cyberattacks have challenged this vision and given rise to perimeterless approaches such as the "zero trust" security model. They focus on the social fabric of society to identify and respond to potential security risks. Digital trust no longer appears as a question of a stable technological object to be fortified and then turning into a "transparent" infrastructure that " sinks into the background" (Star & Ruhleder 1996). Rather, it is the oscillation between infrastructural visibility and invisibility that the field of cybersecurity is focused on today. To account for this gray area, there is a reliance on "worlding through play" (Jagoda et al. 2015), which is reflected in the gamification of cybersecurity through serious games such as "Cyber Fortress Enterprise - Simulation-Strategic Game" or the "National Cyber League". It seeks to open up the "middle ground between knowledge and non-knowledge" (Simmel 1922) in digital infrastructure, establishing a system of "second-order institutional trust" (Warren 2018) through aesthetics, strategies and concepts that are created through play.