Game Design & Tourism: Conceptual Overlaps and Collaborative Opportunities
With the growing popularity of location-based games and augmented reality applications, an opportunity has arisen for tourism destinations to work with game designers and developers to shape tourist experiences. Game-based mobile applications can engage tourists in exploring and learning about the places they visit, and can even be used to shift tourist behavior in ways that benefit the destination. In fact, the academic fields of game design and hospitality/tourism share a great many similarities in their focus on user experience, motivation, and engagement. There is much for game designers to learn from tourism and hospitality experts, as well as great potential for game designers to provide insight into the challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in tourism and hospitality.
In this talk, I will discuss the intersections and complementary components of these two fields, describe a variety of creative examples of tourist-focused games, and discuss the potential for partnerships that benefit both academics and practitioners in each field.