Gamification in Tourism: Designing Memorable Experiences

AUTHORS

INTRODUCTION

From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification.

Alvin Toffler

In the 1970s, the futurist Alvin Toffler, regarded as one of the world’s most influential business voices (Accenture, 2002), wrote a book called Future Shock. Toffler performed a socio-economic analysis of the future and predicted that following the growth of the goods and the service-based economy, a new economic shift would occur. A new sector called the experience industries was envisioned, where experience designers would add a new psychological dimension to enhance the attractiveness of goods and services. For example, at the time, all women rejected a cake powder product that required only water to be baked. This product made the task of a housewife look too easy, eliminating any sense of achievement that could be derived from the cake baking process. The product was successful only after it was changed and required women to add an egg alongside with water to bake the cake. This is just one of Toffler’s examples of why goods have to be designed in a psychologically compelling way, and that goods meant to reduce effort, time and labour, may not always be successful on the market. Similarly, the significance of psychological enticement can also be seen in services. For example, the airline industry that previously focused on getting customers from point A to point B, started competing on creating luxurious surroundings, hiring pretty stewardesses, providing food, in-flight movies, and some even created theme-specific flights. Thus, Toffler concluded that when people live under more affluent conditions and no longer struggle to meet their immediate material needs, the economy reorganises itself to deal with a new level of human needs.

Decades later in 1998, Pine and Gilmore published an article called "Welcome to the Experience Economy". The experience industry that Toffler wrote about decades before, had materialised. Other authors also documented that the change that was predicted by Toffler, had happened. Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) referred to it in the experiential aspects of consumption: consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun; Schulze (1992) called this Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (the experience society) and finally, Jensen’s (1999) book "The Dream Society", also explored this idea. Nevertheless, Pine and Gilmore’s conceptualisation is seen as having the most important impact, for creating an extensive interest in adopting and managing the experience economy concept (Ritchie and Hudson, 2009). Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) findings are based on the growth of US tourism attractions and the leisure industry, such as concerts, theme parks, cinemas and sports events, which appear to overtake other economic sectors in terms of nominal gross domestic product, employment and price. The reason why these businesses outperform others is due to the fact that they provide engaging, unique and memorable experiences. Thus, the new main economic offering in advanced industrial societies is not represented by commodities (as in the agrarian economy), goods (as in the industrial economy) or services (as in the service economy), but by staged memorable experiences (figure 1).

Figure 1. Shifting Up the Progression of Economic Value

Source: Pine and Gilmore (1999, p. 72)

The inability to customise economic offerings and create product differentiation on the market is known as commoditisation (figure 1). Commoditised economic offerings are perceived by customers as homogenous and purchased based only on accessibility and price. Increased competition, rapid technological developments and high customer expectations create an imperative for organisations that want to differentiate themselves on the market, to customise their offerings to the needs of their customers in order to avoid commoditisation.

Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) book about the experience economy was published in fifteen languages and purchased by more than three hundred thousand people worldwide from 1999 until 2011 However, Pine and Gilmore (2011) state that the book does not seem to have influenced enough business leaders and policy makers for them to focus on the new economic order of staging memorable experiences. An example of this is the one that Rory Sutherland, the vice-chairman of the advertising company Ogilvy Group UK, refers to in his TED talks (Sutherland 2009, 2011). For the Eurostar train project, 6 billion pounds were spent to reduce the journey time between London and Paris by forty minutes, from the original three and a half hours of journey time that the train needed. However, for a very small part of the budget WI-FI could have been installed on the trains that would not have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have enhanced the commuter’s experience. For approximately ten percent of the budget, the world’s top male and female supermodels could have been hired to walk up and down the train and serve passengers free Château Pétrus. Under this hypothetical situation, there would still be more than five billion pounds left in excess and people would ask for the train to be slowed down (Sutherland, 2011). This illustrates how business executives and politicians still seem to rely on goods manufacturing and services delivery, as the main thrust to fuelling economic growth. This logic also reflects a type of thinking where rational ideas are prioritised over psychologically enticing ideas (Sutherland, 2011). But the priorities will have to change as in recent years; goods and services are no longer sufficient to create new jobs, nurture economic growth and sustain economic prosperity (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).

It is an unequivocal fact that experiences are essential in the tourism industry (Sternberg, 1997; Canadian Tourism Commission, 2004). A tourism experience refers to an individual’s subjective evaluation of events related to his touristic experiences that happen before, during and after the trip (Tung and Ritchie, 2011). Tourism primarily sells a staged experience and tourism’s central productive activity [is] the creation of the touristic experience (Sternberg 1997, pp. 952,-954). However, while the design of these experiences has already been conducted for a while in tourism, it has been done in an unmanaged manner (Ritchie and Hudson, 2009, p. 120).

Tourists now desire for: their inclusion in unique activities, multi-sensory engagement and for mental, physical, emotional and intellectual stimulation (Canadian Tourism Commission, 2004, Morgan, Elbe and De Esteban Curiel, 2009). Moreover, due to changing customer demands, there is a risk of quality being taken for granted especially within mature tourism market services. The above phenomenon coupled with the advent of the Internet, means that commoditisation seems to be inevitable. Thus, one decides to purchase tourism products and patronise services mainly from the perspective of price consideration. All of these are aspects closely linked to the experience economy where the memorable experience acts as the main economic driver. Therefore, focusing on deliberately designing memorable experiences is essential as the future economic sustainability of the tourism industry is dependent on them.

On the other hand, game designers also aim to create experiences that are wonderful, compelling and memorable (Schell, 2008). The importance of such experiences can be seen in the emergence of digital games as an industry. Here, an exodus is underway as improvements in technology are turning virtual worlds into veritable dreamlands (Castronova, 2008). More and more people are choosing to engage in the virtual realms rather than with reality as hundreds of millions of people all over the globe and of all ages, are choosing to spend more and more time being engaged in video games (McGonigal, 2011a). McGonigal implies that reality compared to game worlds, is not carefully designed to make people happy, to motivate them effectively, to offer them enthralling challenges, pleasures, powerful social bonding or to maximise their potential. Thus, in comparison to what players can experience in game spaces/the virtual world, reality seems to be impoverished (McGonigal, 2013). Therefore, in order for reality to economically survive unchallenged, it will have to offer experiences similar to those in virtual worlds (Castronova, 2008).

Hence, the importance of memorable experiences as economic offerings and the understanding of why game experiences are so engaging seem to be an interesting source of knowledge that the tourism industry can learn from.

The main economic offering of an economy based on experiences, is the memorable experience. But what is exactly a memorable experience? Boswijk, Peelen, Olthof and Beddow (2012) describe what a memorable experience should entail:

to have increased concentration and focus

anticipation, looking forward to something

all of one’s senses are involved

an altered awareness of time

emotional involvement

the process is unique for the individual and has intrinsic value, is irreversible

it involves contact with the ‘raw stuff’, the real thing

it involves a process of doing and undergoing

there is an element of playfulness

there is a balance between being challenged and one’s natural capacities

These memorable experience properties can be grouped according to what tourism and game experiences can offer in general (table 1). Even though table 1 is not based on empirical research; the authors hope that there is a general consensus over the accuracy of the table’s categorisation.

Table 1. Memorable experience properties categorisation

The table shows that games seem to excel at achieving what tourism experiences seldom manage to achieve, and seldom achieve what most tourism experience often achieve. Thus, by analysing both game design and experience design approaches and combining them, one can develop a better design approach towards creating memorable experiences. And even though tourism has been using methods from both experience design and game design throughout history, these concepts were rarely used as a strategic tool for creating experiences. There is no book that links both concepts.

The first concept is experience design that shows how to intentionally use services as a stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event (Pine and Gilmore 1998). The second concept is gamification that shows how to intentionally use game elements for creating a gameful experience (Seaborn and Fels, 2015). The book provides the necessary tools, techniques and examples from both design-thinking approaches with the goal of showing how to create a tourism concept that manages to encapsulate all the essential properties of a memorable experience. By being able to implement such a concept within an established tourism market, an organisation can differentiate itself, increase customer benefits and thus, wield a significant competitive advantage.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

The realm of the experience economy is very broad. Gelter (2006) categorises it according to five dimensions, as follows:

the general experience industry, which is focused on trends and development, economics, socio-cultural factors, cultural geography, etc.

the experience producer, with a focus on the competence areas, entrepreneurship, creativity management, etc.

the experience production, area that studies the production process, how to design and stage experiences, product development, process management, quality management, etc.

the experience product, with a focus on pricing, selling, benchmarking, marketing, quality-assessment, etc.

the experience of the guest, referring to material and immaterial aspects of the experience phenomenology, qualities and categories of experiences etc.

Based on this categorisation, this book focuses on the experience production. This book will particularly focus on bringing two design thinking processes together, experience design in tourism and gamification. This will be done alongside with concepts from related literature fields such as service design, game design, psychology, anthropology and sociology. The book will aim to provide an understanding of these concepts and why they are essential to tourism. It will also present tools, techniques and examples of how to create a memorable experience concept in tourism. Still, due to the interconnectivity of the categories, the book will also cover other areas of the experience economy within the tourism realm, but not in great detail.

The first part of the book defines experience design and gamification. It moves on to analysing why games are engaging, why people are motivated to engage in tourism experiences and what are the factors that make tourists remember their experiences. At the end