Making security playable: two games as a brand channel
Oasis Soccer, a browser football game for the NHI World Cup 2026 campaign. Access Word, a Wordle-style weekly challenge where every answer is a security term. Both live, both playable right now.
The problem
Non-human identity security is genuinely difficult to explain and almost impossible to make anyone care about on a social feed. The World Cup was happening and the company was not in it. And beyond the single campaign moment sat a bigger question: could interactive content become a habit rather than a stunt?
What I did
- Built a 5v5 arcade football game: two halves of ninety seconds, roughly three minutes per match, Ozzy FC against the Rogue Agents.
- Three modes: casual, competitive, and local two-player sharing a single keyboard, with a competitive-only leaderboard and prizes for the top three.
- Made it work properly on mobile as well as desktop, which is where most of the audience actually was.
- Ran an internal beta with the team first, took the feedback on controls and mobile feel, and fixed it before the public launch.
- Followed with Access Word: one security term per week, six guesses, a hint that unlocks after three wrong guesses, and a short security lesson attached to the word.
- Made the second game deliberately small, so it works as a recurring weekly touchpoint rather than a single moment.
What changed
- A campaign people could play rather than scroll past, on its own domain.
- A second playable property that turns one campaign into a repeatable weekly format: pick the term, write the lesson, ship the week.
- A technical security topic turned into something approachable without simplifying it into nonsense.
What I took from it
If you want people to engage with a difficult subject, give them something to do rather than something to read. The beta round mattered more than the build: the controls that felt fine to me did not feel fine to anyone who plays football games. And a game does not need to be big to earn a return visit. Small and weekly beats large and once.
Amit Straus