Designing Serious Games for Effective Customer Engagement in Tourism: A Preliminary Study

Serious games are specialized digital games used in various fields, including tourism. Serious tourism games offer the benefit of strong customer engagement (CE), which is highly valuable to tourism destinations as brands. While principles of effective games for tourism have been studied, how to design the games to exhibit such principles has not. This paper, therefore, presents a preliminary study on the topic. To gain insights on the topic, we applied game analytics in a case study of a serious tourism game promoting Pujon Kidul, a tourism village in Indonesia. We analyzed one continuous metric and four discrete metrics of the players' exploration behaviors and visualized them by a heatmap and a directed graph. From the results, we discuss six problems of gameplay and design and propose four design principles, which shed light on how to design a serious tourism game for optimum CE.

I. Introduction

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) in tourism has proliferated, to the point of disrupting the established tourism practices [1]. ICT has many practical benefits to tourism, even more so in the COVID-19 era, when the social distancing requirement deals a severe blow to the worldwide tourism industry [2]. Among the roles of ICT in tourism is for marketing [3], pp. 259-273], and among the novel ICT tools for the purpose are serious games [4].