[ISEA2024] Paper: Mengyao Guo, Yuanlinxi Li, Yadan Liu & Ze Gao — Liaozhai in the Mirror: Exploring Gender Bias and Awareness through Utilizing Serious Games for Gender Education

Abstract

Keywords:
Gender Relationships, Serious Games, Gender Bias, Gender Education, Cultural Education, Game Mechanics

This paper presents “Liaozhai in the Mirror,” a serious educational game designed to promote gender equality through an interactive visual storytelling environment enhanced by AIgenerated content. The game uses generative AI (GenAI) to show a novel approach to gender education in schools and universities. Drawing inspiration from “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊斋志异)” and the edutainment concept, the game’s visual storytelling significantly influences the narrative outcomes based on the player’s understanding of gender issues. These issues encompass topics such as dating relationships, the role of bystanders, gaslighting, dating violence, gender equality, and consent. The player’s choices directly affect the trajectory and end of the character’s story, with outcomes ranging from unfortunate to enlightening, thereby underscoring the importance of gender education. AI generates 14,348,907 possible outcomes of the same character for different answers through large language models (LLMs) to generate texts and images, and each result is the same in terms of good and bad endings, but the stories vary in diversity.

  • Mengyao Guo is an award-winning Artist, Illustrator, and Graphic Designer based in Shenzhen and Macau. She is an assistant professor at Shenzhen International School of Design and Harbin Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. candidate in visual communication at the University of Macau.
  • Yuanlinxi Li is an Artist and Visual Designer based in Shenzhen. She is now a graduate student majoring in digital media art. She obtained her bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, majoring in animation, and is now studying at Shenzhen International School of Design, Harbin Institute of Technology.
  • Yadan Liu is a serious game producer and an animation director based in Shenzhen. Her serious games have had over a million users and have been selected for the “Internet Trends 2019”. Her animations have been popular all over the internet, with hundreds of millions of views. She is a PhD student in Visual Communication at the University of Macau.
  • Ze Gao is an Artist and Researcher based in Hong Kong and New York. He is a part-time researcher at the Tongji University – MIT Shanghai City Science Lab. His research spans different practices and interests, including AI-generated content, human-computer interaction, museum narratives, entertainment design, and mixed reality.