From CTF to Competence: UX-Driven and Didactic Foundations for Gamified Cybersecurity Training Platforms

This study presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of gamified platforms for cybersecurity education and training, with a particular focus on environments that incorporate attack–defence simulation. The review examines how the literature addresses gamification, User eXperience (UX), didactics, platform design, and sustainability-related deployment conditions across higher education as the primary reference context, while also considering adjacent applied training contexts when they provide transferable evidence for platform design, deployment, or evaluation, including online learning. We analysed 172 studies published between 1 January 2015 and 8 March 2026. The findings show that the field combines authentic hands-on practice with challenge-based learning, feedback-rich progression, and diverse technical formats, including cyber range environments, serious games, CTF-oriented platforms, cloud-based infrastructures, and modular training systems. The review also indicates that the educational value of these approaches depends on the alignment between pedagogical structure, interaction design, and technical architecture, as well as on safe experimentation, adaptability, governance, and long-term maintainability. The review contributes an evidence-based taxonomy and configurational synthesis of recurrent design patterns across UX, didactics, gamification, architecture, and sustainability, and it identifies implications for future empirical research and for the design of sustainable, learner-centred cybersecurity teaching platforms.