TRAVEL / APPS SPECIAL....Let’s play: Making travel a game

 Let’s play: Making travel a game 

Several apps and programmes are turning holidays into contests, offering GPS challenges and dispensing trivia

    It was a Sunday afternoon in SoHo and while most New Yorkers were having brunch, Makeda Peters and her boyfriend were on a street corner craning their necks at a seven-story art installation called “The Wall,” about to embark on what’s known among travellers who love puzzles and prizes as a “gamified city tour.”
    For the next three hours the couple would explore the area and learn about its history by tackling trivia questions and accepting benign dares — challenges that came not from a tour guide, but from an app called Stray Boots that Peters had downloaded to her iPhone.
    The first question seemed like a test to ensure that they were in the right spot: “What colour is the wall painted?” Peters typed “blue” on her iPhone. Up popped the verdict: “Correct!” That earned her 10 points from the app, which then provided some history about the 1973 artwork by Forrest Myers. The couple spent the rest of the afternoon racking up points for each riddle and dare they polished off, striving to achieve a perfect score of 240.
    “As we answered questions correctly, we were high-fiving in the middle of the street,” said Peters, a program coordinator in Brooklyn for a national nonprofit organisation called Playworks. “You learn so many cool things.”
    Stray Boots, which sells $2-to-$12 tours of more than a dozen cities including New Orleans, Philadelphia and Miami, was introduced last year. Since then, it has sold more than 85,000 tours, roughly doubling sales each year, said its chief executive, Avi Millman.
    The app is merely one product in a wave of new travel programmes and promotions that are using game theory to win over customers. Today, online tour operators like Expedia are incorporating avatars and trivia contests into the browsing and booking process. Tourism offices in Pennsylvania and Illinois are proffering exclusive Foursquare badges to those who check in at sites in their states. Museums are using portable multimedia players to make walking through their collections feel a bit like being in a multiplayer video game. And the America’s State Parks Foundation is rolling out a new app by ParksbyNature Network called the Pocket Ranger that enables users to earn points and win prizes by signing up for GeoChallenges, outdoor quests that require players to use the app’s GPS feature to navigate to sites like reservoirs and dams.
    It may sound like play, but it’s part of a broader business trend known as gamification. Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book The Gamification Revolution, describes it as the process of using the best ideas from games, loyalty and behavioural economics to engage people and solve problems (or both). It generally involves the use of motivational techniques and psychological triggers, like being alerted to a challenge or offered an opportunity for higher status, often in combination with digital candy like badges, points and leader boards. (Some of the fundamental ideas are derived from research by the social scientist BJ Fogg at Stanford University; you can learn about gaming your own behaviour at Behaviorwizard.org).
    Zichermann, himself an avid traveller, said that things elemental to travel are also elemental to gamification. Hard-core travellers like to keep score: they know how many countries they’ve visited and how many miles they’ve flown. They take pleasure in accumulating badges, like stamps on their passport (and, in bygone days, stickers on their luggage). They check off must-see landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon as if they are levels in a video game. Even the act of travelling from one place to another becomes a personal challenge: to do so with ever more speed and status.
    On a deeper level, though, great gaming experiences speak to our inner desire for mastery, autonomy and purpose, Zichermann noted. The same can be said of travel. “Why do we travel?” he said. “It’s about creating memories and discovering ourselves. Gamification is perfectly aligned with that.”
    As for Peters, she and her boyfriend liked their first gamified city tour so much that they tried another one. Also from Stray Boots, it led them through the West Village, from the “secret” garden of St Luke’s Church to New York’s oldest continuously running Off Broadway theatre, the Cherry Lane. The tour was called The Perfect Date.
    And it was. “We were able to see New York landmarks that we never really knew existed,” Peters said. “It gave us the opportunity to open our eyes and see things differently.” NYT NEWS SERVICE

Stephanie Rosenbloom  TOI130602