Tourism is largely about creating great experiences for travelers. Travel is often the great experience in itself. We travel often because we want to create experiences to enrich our life and make memories to cherish forever. Games are great in making experiences, and the design of games and the concepts that go into creating them can give us great hints into creating better experiences for tourists.

By understanding how games create experiences through interacting with the world, media, and each other, we can start to create better experiences for travelers. Game design can help us understand how we interact with others and the environment for recreation. The concepts that go into making games can inform how travelers are motivated to participate in different experiences.

One of the most important ideas of using game design in tourism contexts is the idea of gamification. Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. However, individual and contextual differences exist.