Ultimate Celebrity Manager:
An innovative way to teach online identity management and safety to young people
The Western Cape Colab, as part of its national digital skills development mandate coordinated through NEMISA, identified the need for an innovative approach to teach youth to manage their online identity and safety (cyber security awareness).
The problem statement the Western Cape CoLab aimed to address with the design of this educational game is the following:
How might we create an entertaining, fun game for users aged 15-21 that includes educational course content about Digital Identity Management, and is able to measure behaviour change using analytics without invading the users’ privacy or security?
An inclusive co-creation process was conducted between the CoLab team, government and third sector stakeholders, local community youth representatives and Sea Monster (an award-winning Cape Town based game design studio). This process has produced a mobile game concept fusing the casual appeal of virtual pet apps with the familiarity of social networks. It includes detective-style gameplay and simple puzzle solving to promote fun while educating users around the subject of Digital Identity Management.
The game was built upon current best practice and foundational principles of online identity management. These principles include, amongst others, ensuring that users realise the amount of control they should exercise when interacting online, the complexities of giving consent and ensuring disclosure only to justifiable parties and ensuring minimal disclosure for constrained use of personally identifiable data.
Through the game analytics we are able to gather insights on how players make decisions affecting their online safety without having to ask users for personally identifiable information. We applied the principles of “privacy-by-design” in creating the game. The game will also run in real time, meaning the user is encouraged to keep playing over a longer period to and iterate on the core educational message of the experience.
The game, which has specifically been designed not to use large amounts of data, is available on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store and we would like to invite our stakeholders to download, play and share it.