HUPG '18: Games and Tourism
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This document discusses the conceptual overlap between games and tourism and opportunities for collaboration. It provides background on the author's research in digital games and realization of connections to tourism through experiences with her son in Dubrovnik and a tour of Italy inspired by Assassin's Creed. The author explores the fields of games and tourism research and notes similarities in how both focus on experiences, motivations, and user/co-creation of content. She envisions future opportunities to apply theories to practical collaborations between the industries.
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HUPG '18: Games and Tourism
- 1. Games & Tourism Conceptual Overlap & Collaborative Opportunities Prof. Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Ph.D. Rochester Institute of Technology School of Interactive Games & Media & the MAGIC Center links.lawley.net/hupg18
- 2. UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL GAMES A little background
- 3. What You’re Probably Thinking
- 4. What We’re Actually Doing
- 5. HOW DID I GET HERE?
- 6. Picture the Impossible (2009)
- 12. GAMES & TOURISM: MY AHA! MOMENTS Putting the Pieces Together
- 13. “I’m living in Assassin’s Creed.” -my 16yo son, March 2013, Dubrovnik
- 14. Our “Assassins’ Creed” Tour of Italy
- 19. GAMES AND TOURISM RESEARCH Exploring the Field, Part 1
- 21. Geogames
- 22. Cultural Heritage Games (2017- on)
- 24. CONCEPTUAL OVERLAP & INTERDISCIPLINARY POTENTIAL Tourism Research and Games Research
- 25. Games and Tourism Are About Experiences
- 26. Motivation
- 27. Content Creation in Tourism “Co-Creation”
- 28. Content Creation in Games “User-Generated Content”
- 29. FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
- 34. NO, YOU CAN’T PLAY IT YET…
- 37. Next Steps?
Editor's Notes
- I'm going to start with some context, in the form of stories. One about a game
- PTI was a seven-week alternate reality game with a mix of game activities: web-based puzzles, newspaper puzzles, weekly creative challenges, and weekly mobile scavenger hunts. The goal of the game was to engage community members in learning about and exploring downtown Rochester. We didn't label it as "local tourism," but that's absolutely what it was. The newspaper wanted to target young professionals, and we wanted to target families, and we were successful on both counts. We also engaged a surprising number of seniors, probably because of the newspaper connection.
- We looked at the neighborhoods that we thought our players would enjoy exploring, and the community events happening in the fall that we could coordinate with.
- This was long before mobile augmented reality was an option, so our use of technology was very basic—for our mobile scavenger hunts, we used a system that worked as well with simple text messages as it did with a smartphone app.
- We were very successful at getting people to visit historic locations around the city. This is two university students sitting in Mount Hope cemetery at the grave of George Selden, the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile. They’re wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and reading the local Gannett newspaper.
- We also included some game components that were computer-based. Each weekday, we released a new puzzle, with content based on that week's content theme. On Wednesdays, for instance, there would be a map puzzle, challenging people to locate landmarks on a map of the city. This was the food and drink week. (Nick Tahou’s is the home of one of Rochester’s most colorful signature foods, the garbage plate.)
- We also included puzzles in the newspaper each week, along with reporting about the game and the players. We had two types of competition in the game—an individual leaderboard with cumulative points earned in the game, which was used to determine which players would be invited to a celebratory gala at the end of the game, and a team-based challenge that aggregated points from players affiliated with one of our three factions on a weekly basis, and used that to determine how much of a charitable contribution would be made to that group's affiliated charity. The team standings, paper-based puzzles, and stories about what was happening in the game, occupied a full-page spread in the local paper on a weekly basis throughout the game.
- In the spring of 2013, I spent a semester teaching at RIT’s campus in Dubrovnik, Croatia—one of the top tourist destinations on the Adriatic Sea. I wasn't there to teach about games—I was helping our Information Sciences & Technologies department cover classes on Technology Transfer and Needs Assessment. But as with most things I do, games ended up being a major theme.
- My first Aha! Moment came when my then 16yo son took this photo from the city walls not long after we arrived. He posted it to Facebook with this caption. It made me think about the value in having game design students spend time studying here. The richness and depth of texture—physical, historical, narrative—lends itself to thinking very differently about design. (Two years later I had a chance to talk to Patrice Désilets, one of the lead designers on Assassin's Creed, and he told me that he actually brought the design team to Dubrovnik for a little while while they were working on the game.)
- The second Aha moment was closely related to the first. I had told my son that we could spend ten days after graduation visiting the European country of his choice, and he opted to plan out an Assassin's Creed-themed tour of Italy—we visited Rome, Florence, San Gimignano, Venice, and Forli. (With a brief detour to Trento so I could give a talk there.)
- Here he is listening to the Assassin's Creed soundtrack while watching the sunset from Plaza di Michelangelo. A perfect merger of games, culture and travel!
- It turns out I wasn’t the first person to make this connection between Assassin’s Creed and Italian tourism—but I didn’t find this article until I started doing more in-depths research on games and tourism this year.
- Here's the third Aha moment. One of the stops on our Assassin’s Creed tour was historic San Gimignano, a town that—like Dubrovnik—is fascinating for history and architecture buffs, but significantly less engaging for kids. But in the museum just inside the gates of town, the welcome center sold a treasure hunt game, complete with kid's activity book, that turned exploring the town into a playful activity.
- I saw kids throughout the town with their books, eagerly scanning architectural details and views looking for the answers to the puzzles in the book. The potential for using something similar in Dubrovnik was intriguing. Three aha! moments was enough to make me want to make this my new area of research and teaching focus. So, I started looking around for other examples of successful games related to travel and tourism.
- I was a Fulbright scholar in spring of 2015, with a focus on developing curriculum in games and tourism at RIT Croatia. There was very little for me to draw on from a curricular standpoint, since so few schools are teaching in this space. Because it was a teaching fellowship, however, my time for digging into the literature was limited. So…
- And, of course, who doesn’t know about Pokemon Go? It’s one of the few commercial games that tourism agencies immediately recognized the potential for.
- The more I dug into the literature, however, the more I recognized areas of overlap between the two fields.
- Motivation—the psychology behind motivation is a huge issue in both fields. Why do people play/enjoy games? Why do people travel? Why do they choose the types of games (or trips) that they do?
- We need more interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary partnerships. Not just with content experts (museums, historians), but with process experts as well, people who understand the motivations associated with tourists and travel. And we need more emphasis on interdisciplinarity and globalization in our educational processes, something that we’re working hard on at RIT, leveraging our strong program in hospitality and service management in Dubrovnik and our games program in Rochester.
- The best applications offer a solution to a problem. After reading about tourism in Dubrovnik, and talking with a representative of Dubrovnik’s development agency, my students wanted to develop a game that could address two problems: first, getting people to notice and appreciate the history and culture of the city, and second, encouraging people to explore beyond the Old Town and the beaches.
- Our goal is an MVP at the end of the semester; it will incorporate two quests in the Old Town, and one that takes people to the Island of Lokrum.
- We began the design process in mid February, and have only until May 7th to complete the MVP. We’ve made excellent progress, but we certainly won’t be ready for a full release after only 2.5 months of work.
- Despite our time constraints, and the fact that this not a full time job for the nine students working on it, we hope to implement three narrative quests by the end of the semester, as a proof of concept for how it could be used.