Gamification in tourism

Game – based marketing offers a potentially new type of marketing opportunity in tourism. Gaming or electronic games provide players with an immersive and interactive entertainment experience often through dynamic and real – time interaction with their context, local organisations and fellow players (Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang 2015). The development of technology such as smartphones and tablets, gaming becomes mobile and allows dynamic interaction in the palm of the users’ hand.

According to researchers mobile games have changed the game players’ experience in a number of ways (Blum, Wetzel, Mccall, Oppermann, & Broll, 2012). One of the changes is that gaming experiences have been extended into the real world, and are available at any place and at any time (Benford, Magerkurth, & Ljungstand, 2005).

Recently, the application of game elements have been used in a non – gaming context called gamification, such as business, health and education (Xu, Webber, & Buhalis, 2014). Technology is designed to change attitudes and behaviours of users through persuasion and social influence (Bogost, 2007), without using deception.

As a new approach to promote tourism destinations, gaming provides tourism organisations and destination marketers with the opportunity to create informative and entertaining setting for successful brand awareness, interaction and communication. Middleton (1994) said that tourist decision – making is affected by both formal (advertising, internet and sales promotion) and informal channels of communication, which forms stimulus inputs.

Gaming has the potential to help develop experiences and support dynamic interactions, for example: location – based games can be a way of experiencing points of interests for tourists through a treasure hunt.

Some games often collect information about brand consumers, determine behaviour patterns, thought processes, priorities, and interests. Engaging users/tourists at a deeper level to help them conceptualise and improve their experience. An example is the Dublin Augmented Reality Project, which is funded by Dublin City Council to develop a mobile augmented reality (AR) application for the tourism industry in Dublin.

Gaming in tourism is a new and emerging area. However, it is very challenging as designers need to have an understanding of both the tourists’ needs and the gamers’ desires, and then blend them together to deliver memorable, fun and engaging gaming experience.

The use of games in the tourism industry may potentially provide great marketing opportunities. Tourism is an experience industry (Pine & Gilmore, 2011) that is increasingly based on personalisable services. According to the World Travel Market Report (2011), gamification is a major trend for the coming years in tourism, which will appeal to consumers across all age demographics.

There current use of gaming by the tourism industry can be divided into two types:

1.    Social games – based on social media such as Facebook, which are mainly used for brand awareness, to attract potential customers, and to build up a destination or a company image.

2.   Location based – are mainly used to encourage more engagement on – site, to enhance tourists’ on – site experiences at the destination in a more fun and informative way (Waltz & Ballagas, 2007).

Conclusion

For gamification to become effective and useful for the travel and tourism industry, a sufficient understanding of players’ motives and gaming experience will need to be considered in order to design the games. Gamification can help to make marketing personalised for tourism and will also provide the opportunity to build online communities. Destinations around the world are investing more in how to use ICT in destination management and marketing. Gaming can enhance tourists’ interest in the destination, provide experience and knowledge which is otherwise not available.

References:

Benford, S., Magerkurth, C., Ljungstrand, P. (2005). Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming. Communications of the ACM, 48 (3), 54 – 57. doi: 10.1145/1047671

Blum, L., Wetzel, R., Mccall, R., Oppermann, L., & Broll, W. (2012). The final timewarp: Using form and content to support player experience and presence when designing location – aware mobile augmented reality games. In Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (pp. 711 – 720).

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang (2015): Tourists as Mobile Gamers: Gamification for Tourism Marketing. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing. doi: 10.1080/10548408.2015.1093999

Middleton, V. T. C. (1994). Marketing in travel and tourism. Oxford: Butterworth – Heinemann

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (2011). The experience economy, updated version. Watertown, MA: Harvard Business School.

Waltz, S. P., & Ballagas, R. (2007, September 24 – 28). Pervasive persuasive: A rhetorical design approach to a location – based spell – casing game for tourists In Proceedings of situated play. DiGRA 2007 – The 3^rd international digital games research conference (pp. 489 – 597). Tokyo.

Xu, F., Webber, J., & Buhalis, D. (2014, January 21 – 4). The gamification of tourism. In Z. Xiang & I. Tussyadiah (Eds.), Information and communication technologies in tourism 2014 (pp. 525 – 537). Wein: Springer. Proceedings of the international Conference in Dublin. Yee, N. (2006). Motivations for play in online games. Cyber Psychology & Behavior, 9 (6), 772 – 775. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772