Examining the overlap between game design and tourism psychology
Can the experience of play be compared to the act of tourism? In a GDC 2022 talk, The Moonwalls indie game developer and and academic lecturer at the Academy of Art in Szczecin Marcin Makaj makes the case that the philosophical framework around the psychology of tourism can be applied to players in the virtual world, with implications for how we design in-game experiences.
To begin the lecture, Makaj provided a definition of a real-world tourist, as a "person who voluntarily leaves his place of residence to temporarily go to a different place to experience other cultures customers or events and then return to familiar surroundings." Tourism, it is argued, is characterized by impermanence, voluntary, and its primary purpose is to experience other places and cultures. There are many theorists who have summarized the motivations and desires of tourists. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin felt that modern tourists do not want a real experience, but rather, a sanitized one. They are typically drawn to landscape features, a framework of reality rather than the authentic experience of the culture they are visiting. Professor of human economy Dean MacCannell meanwhile, feels that tourists are not given opportunities for that authenticity and have to seek it out themselves. And professor of sociology and anthropology Erik Cohen's theory acts perhaps as a bridge between these two ideas, arguing that tourists pursue staged events because they do not have the expertise to seek out authenticity, and having such skills is seen as opposite of entertainment.
These definitions, Makaj argues, can be applied to players. They want something new and different from their own reality, but they want it to be safe. They want a safe margin to
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