New Age Mages: An Interactive Way to Explore and Subvert Gender Biases

Abstract

From a young age, children are exposed to societal standards of gender and gender roles and, by extension, inherent sex-based biases, which can become inculcated into their worldview. These biases affect their daily lives negatively in ways that can seem almost natural unless specifically pointed out. Table Top Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) are pen-and-paper games that revolve around collaborative storytelling in a shared, collectively imagined and built world, usually involving 2 to 5 players. TTRPGs provide a safe, controlled environment to mimic social interactions in a way that video games and other forms of media cannot. This paper introduces a new TTRPG, New Age Mages, aimed at a younger audience, with the goal of introducing the concept of biases and helping them to see things from a different perspective. In New Age Mages, players interact with a world where magic is commonplace as students that have recently unlocked their magic, while a Game Master (GM) narrates the world as determined by the players’ choices. The game’s magic system allows it to mimic the influence and/or impact of modern-day gender roles and biases without referring to them directly while remaining simple and easy to learn for a new player. The game also aims to subtly incentivise the Players to make decisions that would be different from what they might usually make, and promote trying to understand the others’ points of view. We believe this game will be useful for those seeking to help children gain a better understanding of gender roles and their subversion. We use a questionnaire based on the Gender Role Attitudes Scale (GRAS) to measure the impact gameplay has on players’ ideas of gender roles. We also test the game with some initial gameplay experiments among a smaller audience that is more familiar with TTRPGs and present the results. Our work explores not only the ability of TTRPGs to influence perspectives and opinions, but also doing so specifically in the space of understanding gender roles among a younger audience.