Gamification for Tourism
“Life is more fun if you play games.”
British novelist Roald Dahl’s suggestion has gained more and more prominence since then, especially nowadays, in our digital era, which enables a wide range of facilities, technologically. We use tiny devices, e.g. our smartphones, cameras, smart glasses, and smartwatches for almost everything, as their names imply, they’ve got smarter and smarter. The technology also brought revived and advanced game industry within. Surely, gaming goes back a long, long way (a simple googling suggests that the oldest game is predicted to date back around 6000 BCE), still, our technology provides the fastest, the most varying, the most intriguing games along with the history for us. The last two decades have yielded the term “gamification” inspired by gaming approaches. Gamification is mainly inserting game-related content into non-game settings for different purposes such as education, interaction, experience augmentation, and so on. Gamification can be an efficient way to make people complete arduous or unappealing tasks. A great example: Microsoft Solitaire can be considered as a relatively aged and plain gamification case. It is implemented and provided on Windows OS to make people accustomed to an operating system, graphical user interface, and mouse cursor.
The tourism industry is a brand new gamification area and gamification for tourism has started to be adopted rapidly. It can enhance touristic experiences and increase interest in tourism activities, like cultural site visits, and local explorations. A gamification implementation as a quest game is proposed in a study*. They developed an application for visitors to use during their visits to PP-IPTEK Museum TMII, Indonesia. The application is essentially a quiz game for which the visitors found answers to questions about museum artifacts. The answers are placed in the museum and the visitors can use them to answer the questions by QR code scanning. Additionally, there are sections for “Achievement”, “Challenges”, and “Rewards”. Based on a statistical analysis of 3 groups of participants’ data, this study suggests that gamification for that visit improved learning.
Besides straightforward games, some other approaches enhance overall tourism activities by extending the visitors’ reality. Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) applications are being used for some time now. VR enables remote and virtual tours of touristic places or in-place experiences with head-mounted displays (HMD). AR can be used broadly to improve the touristic experience in place. Further, we can combine VR and AR, we can extend the tourist experience with MR by making the tourists use devices such as Microsoft HoloLens. AR applications are rendered possible via smartphones and these types of applications boost overall experience by expanding our perception and sensation. Considering these, we can conclude that AR applications are more common since they guarantee the in-place experience and can be used via smartphones and tablets rather than relatively immobile and costly HMDs or VR glasses. For instance, one may view a restored version of visited ruins by aligning them with a smartphone camera, or Pokemon Go type of click-and-collect game activities during a holiday makes everything more enjoyable. A more prevalent gamification approach is treasure hunting. It’s been enriched on mobile devices thanks to AR technology. Any virtual tool related to the activity content, e.g. sword, armor, laser tag, rope, can be spawned on an AR-based mobile treasure hunt, and hunting virtual or physical items would increase engagement in the touristic or cultural activity. Some of the commonly visited metropolises all around the world, e.g. Paris have appeared to use treasure hunting to intensify the tourist experience.
The tourism industry is supposed to be fun by itself, which makes gamification ideas very welcomed. The visitors are already interested in activities, and they’ll be willing to try progressive approaches and spread their wings. For me, one of the best things about gamification is that it’s unbounded (or bounded by our imagination and inspiration) and it leads enjoyable paths 😊
*Kristianto, Kelvin, et al. “Implementation of gamification to improve learning in museum.” Journal of Engineering and Science Research 2.1 (2018): 71–76.
