Video Games as Tourism
Given the seemingly limitless spaces for players to explore virtual worlds, play and the perception of such worlds may be characterized as a tourist experience. Borrowing from John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s notion of the tourist gaze, employing a tourism framework onto games can address ideas of perception in game worlds, the player’s relationship to those through their player-character and how they relate to mass media consumer culture as commercial products. As video game technology advances, travel as a mode of perception may also be considered as a design imperative to deliver a rich play experience. In other words, video games are produced and created with the specific purpose of engaging players in touristic ways. This project investigates play as travel, motifs of travel in virtual worlds, as well as the player-traveler, suggesting tourism today is a transmedial mode, shaping how we consider play but also tourism in an age of mass media.