Gamification in Tourism E-Book

Paul Bulencea

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 205

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Tourists' expectations are increasingly complex and sophisticated. They are now seeking meaningful and more stimulating experiences from tourism providers. By combining Gamification with Experience Design the Gamification in Tourism book provides a comprehensive and novel approach on how to design such experiences. With its Memorable Experience Design framework and practical case studies the book should help tourism providers shift their thinking as to what they can offer in order to cater to the new needs of their guests.

Leseprobe

Paul Bulencea

“For my family that encouraged me to play and explore the world.”

Roman Egger

“For all my intrinsically motivated students who affirm that education is a fundamental right.”

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

PART I: FRAMING

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

GAMIFICATION

WHY ARE GAMES ENGAGING?

TOURIST MOTIVATION AND MEMORY

THE LINK: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

PART II: DESIGN

MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE DESIGN FRAMEWORK

PROCESS

PROPERTIES

COMPONENTS

EXPERIENCE ENHANCERS

THE FUTURE

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE 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

Specific toMemorable experience propertiesTourismall senses are involved the process is unique for the individual and has intrinsic value, is irreversible it involves contact with the ‘raw stuff’, the real thingGamesincreased concentration and focus there is an element of playfulness there is a balance between being challenged and one’s natural capacitiesTourism and Gamesanticipation, looking forward to something emotional involvement it involves a process of doing and undergoing an altered awareness of time

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 of the first part, the authors link experience design and gamification together, by using a positive psychology framework.

The second part of the book introduces and describes the memorable experience design framework. It explains how to design memorable experiences with examples and mini-cases from tourism and game design.

The book concludes by suggesting that linking gamification to experience design, might offer an unparalleled formula for crafting transformative experiences. According to Pine and Gilmore (1999), these represent the next level of economic offerings after staging experiences.

Readers will not receive a “cookie-cutter” method that they can just take and simply apply as a template. In other words, this is not a clear and rigid guideline on how to deliver memorable experiences in tourism. Such a guideline cannot be offered due to the complex and complicated nature of the tourism experience and also, due to the mysterious ways in which creativity works. “Cookie cutter” techniques are ultimately too superficial and can never serve as a long-term strategy for staging experiences.

For industry practitioners, this book is akin to a general cooking book where tools and techniques of cooking are presented together with recipe examples. In order to be able to deliver memorable experiences, extensive practice, iteration, self-learning and research are required. For academics, this serves as a first attempt to link these two design thinking techniques within a tourism context but also on a broader level. Until now, this linkage has not been made and thus, the book can be a basis for further research.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

This book consists of two main parts: framing and design. Under framing, the authors combine the two main approaches used in this book, namely experience design and gamification. The design part introduces and explains the memorable experience design (MED) framework that includes patterns from game design and a number of mini-cases, illustrating affiliated theories in a tourism context.

In the second part of the book, symbols help the reader to identify:

Which part of the MED framework is currently explained

A game design example

A tourism example or mini-case

PART ONE

FRAMING

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

CHAPTER ONE

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

The increasing demands of customer expectations, intensified global competition and tourism demand fluctuations, are the dominant challenges facing tourism nowadays (Williams, A. 2012). Therefore, tourism businesses have been forced to come up with new means of providing a competitive advantage to address these challenges (Walls, Okumus, Wang and Kwun, 2011). The provision of memorable experiences in a highly competitive market situation is seen as essential by academics and practitioners alike. Memorable experiences are directly linked with positive customer behavioural intentions, such as positive word of mouth, which would also encourage other people to engage with businesses (Chandralal and Valenzuela, 2013; Ritchie and Crouch, 2003), and also with increased sales revenues (Kim, J. 2010). But how are these memorable experiences conceptualised and developed?

This is done through experience design, a novel and rather undiscovered concept, which has a theoretical and practical dimension that exists within tourism and also other disciplines (Mansfeldt, Vestager and Iversen, 2008; Stickdorn and Schneider, 2012). Due to the relative obscurity of the term experience design, it is essential to explain what it means.

The word “experience” has a dual conceptualisation in the English language. For a better understanding, Gelter (2006) refers to other languages such as German, Swedish and Finnish to compare the different nuances. The English Oxford Dictionary has more definitions for the word experience. When referring to the first meaning of “experience” as Erfahrung (in German), the term can be understood as “the knowledge or skill acquired by a period of practical experience of something”. The second connotation as Erlebnis (in German) refers to “an event or occurrence, which leaves an impression on someone” and at the same time as “encountering or undergoing an event or occurrence”. In the context of experience design, practitioners and academics alike refer to the meaning that Erlebnis denotes: “encountering an event or occurrence, which leaves an impression on someone”.

When analysing what a tourism experience is, there is no agreed definition within academia but a recent study performed a review of several definitions of the tourism experience and came up with a comprehensive definition: “an individual’s subjective evaluation and undergoing (i.e., affective, cognitive, and behavioural) of events related to his/her tourist activities which begins before (i.e., planning and preparation), during ... and after the trip” (Tung and Ritchie, 2011, p.3).

Within the context of the experience economy field, the tourism experience definition needs to be qualified by some extra remarks: that the experience should leave a lasting positive impression on the guest and encapsulate the memorable experience properties defined by Boswijk et al. (2012) (see introduction).

Now when referring to tourism experience design, due to the fact that design has several meanings and is context dependent (it can be used as a noun, adjective, verb and adverb), it is important to frame what is meant exactly by tourism experience design. Tussyadiah (2014), firstly refers to design as a plan that is an outcome of designing, created in the context of tourism as a tourism experience concept. Secondly, designing comprises of a series of activities for producing a design (the tourism experience concept). Lastly, design research is a part of designing and refers to a chain of investigations that involve gathering and analysing information necessary for the designing process. Therefore, tourism experience design comprises of three factors: the activity of designing that is supported by design research with an objective of creating a tourism experience concept, which is the design (Tussyadiah, 2014).

Yet, it is highly debatable whether or not an experience can be designed. Experiences are fundamentally personal and emotional, and there are many factors that cannot be influenced by management. For example, the guest’s interpretation of situations is often based on his/her cultural background, current mood, personality, expectations, prior experience and also, a plethora of other factors.

However, several authors argue that even despite these limitations, an experience can still be designed. This does not necessarily guarantee that it will become memorable but still it will significantly increase the chances of such an experience being so. Shedroff (2001, p. 2) points out that “the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which makes them designable.” Tarssanen and Kylänen (2009), and Pullman and Gross (2004) also agree that it is possible to design the experience by focusing on certain aspects that will make it more likely for the guests to have a memorable experience.

Pullman and Gross (2004, p. 551) define experience design as a method “to create an emotional connection with customers or guests through careful planning of tangible and intangible service elements”. Moritz (2005) has a similar approach in describing experience design. The goal of experience design, in his view, is the creation of successful client experiences with the inclusion of the five senses, interactivity, personal meaning and emotional content.

Designing and delivering a memorable experience is a “messy process” (Stuart and Tax, 2004, p. 623). This can be seen as a result of the multidisciplinary nature of experience design and the novelty of this field. This is the reason why the authors have allocated the second part of the book to deconstructing the “messy process” of memorable experience design in tourism.

CHAPTER TWO

GAMIFICATION

The use of play and games beyond leisurely entertainment is nothing new, but one of the main reasons why it has become an important topic in recent years is due the emergence of the experience economy, an economy where individuals value the maximisation of self-expression and personal well-being over authority and economic achievement (Deterding, 2014).

Gamification is an approach still undergoing development that aims to encourage motivation, enjoyment and engagement in non-gaming contexts (Seaborn and Fels, 2015). There has been no universally accepted definition of gamification until now (Werbach and Hunter, 2012, Seaborn and Fels, 2015). While gamification has recently been gaining scientific attention, there are just a few scientific papers that aim to provide a definition (Huotari and Hamari, 2012, Deterding et al., 2011, Werbach and Hunter 2012). In a recent study that performed a systematic survey of the academic literature on gamification, Seaborn and Fels (2015) state that at the intersection between the conceptualisation of gamification provided by Huotari and Hamari (2012), Deterding Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke, (2011) and Werbach and Hunter (2012), a standard definition of gamification is emerging:

[...] the intentional use of game elements for a gameful experience of non-game tasks and contexts. Game elements are patterns, objects, principles, models, and methods directly inspired by games. (Seaborn and Fels, 2015, p. 17)

But what exactly is a gameful experience? McGonigal (2011b) defines being gameful as: “having the spirit of the gamer: someone who is optimistic, curious, motivated, and always up for a tough challenge”. And it is precisely these properties, of a gameful experience, that can enhance a tourism experience and bring it closer to resembling a memorable experience (table 1). This could be the reason why the repercussions of gamification as a growing trend can also be seen in tourism.

The first use of the term gamification according to its mainstream current understanding, was coined in 2003 by a British game developer called Nick Pelling who had a consultancy firm for developing game-like interfaces for electronic gadgets (Werbach and Hunter, 2012). In 2010, the term became widely adopted. In a talk at the DICE conference of 2010, Jessie Schell presented numerous examples of how games are leaving the realm of fantasy and becoming increasingly realistic. Schell (2010) stated that measurement sensors and other types of technology are going to be used to enhance gameplay in reality. Besides gamification terms such as “playful design” (Ferrara, 2012) “funware” and “game layer” (Prierbatsch, 2010), other terms continue to appear. However, all of them hint towards the same design approach that gamification refers to (Deterding et al., 2011).

Gamification is a difficult term to work with, as it is cryptic on one level, its meaning not immediately perceptible and it does not integrate the complexity of all the phenomenon it refers to. A number of researchers and game developers avoid using the term as well, due to the fact that the complexities of game design are made to look easy. In spite of the above, gamification has established itself as a fairly common term (Werbach and Hunter, 2012).

Academics and industry practitioners have debated gamification equally. As a result there are several major approaches and frequently emerging conflicting points within the topic (Walz and Deterding, 2014). However, even if the term gamification is slightly loaded and problematic, this book will examine a diverse sample of theories, techniques and methods from the design approach of gamification and other related concepts and approaches, in order to gain insights on how to best design memorable experiences in tourism. And even though a better name might be used to describe this phenomenon in the future, the term gamification has somehow stuck around (Werbach and Hunter, 2013) and will not be so easily replaced by new alternatives (Burke, 2014). It is possible that in the future, the term will completely cease to exist as people conduct further research and deepen their understanding of what the word refers to. For example, Schell (2014) sees that gamification will become a redundant term in future and will just be seen as another facet of design, designing for motivation.