How Computer Games Can Save the Travel Industry

Written By Dev Kumar
The other day, I heard two guys talking about a horrendous experience they’d just returned from. They’d been traveling behind enemy lines, been taken in by generous locals, crawled through caves, and found themselves in underground tunnels, from which they had to escape under enemy fire. I figured they were shell-shocked mercenaries back from an overseas mission.It turned out, they had been playing The Elder Scrolls V. Skyrim on their computers.And for them, it wasn’t just some game. Their retelling was so vivid that it was clearly real for them. It was just a different kind of reality.It was also the closest thing to a happy, free, and unconflicted conversation about travel I’ve heard all year. It was certainly a nice change from all the lamenting and handwringing about how COVID-19 has blindsided all of us in the travel industry.These days, of course, the luxury travel industry is suffering immensely. Not only is there a global pandemic but also an ever-changing patchwork of global travel restrictions and more than a little real or feared economic distress. The year 2020 will go down as many things, but “the year that we stopped traveling” will be one of them. People decided to hunker down at home, and quite a lot of them picked up a gaming console.This is on top of the multitudes who already were. In his 2019 TED Talk about the transformative power of video games, entrepreneur Herman Narula pointed out that there were 2.6 billion gamers that same year, up from 1.6 billion in 2014 (and less than who-knows-how-many in this weird socially distanced year). Video games, he argued, are suddenly a medium like film or literature, and they’re in the midst of a full-on renaissance.It’s easy to whine, to complain, to give up, to lament that fictional worlds, VR, and AR can never replace real, in-the-flesh travel. But where does that get us? What if we tried to learn something from the massive growing world of gaming instead? What if we saw this as a time to look beyond ourselves, our companies, and our industry? What if we noticed the relentless trends and let them inspire us to do better — to revisit, to reimagine, to deliver more, to reject the conventions and raise the bar?First, let’s consider three big advantages of video games.ImmersionVideo games and VR allow people to see and experience places in the world that would otherwise be impossible or near-impossible due to various circumstances — COVID-19, certainly, but also the high costs of travel, the time it takes, the difficulty of obtaining visas. They also allow for a sort of time travel, in which players find themselves in real-world historical places and events such as ancient Greece, World War II Germany, or onboard the Titanic.Many travel experiences in the virtual world are enhanced versions of their real-world counterparts. And sometimes they’re just better. Take the VR Mona Lisa experience. It’s a big improvement over the reality of going to Paris, queuing for the Louvre, and peering over the heads of hundreds of other tourists to get a glimpse of something that’s behind bullet-proof glass and so far away you can’t really appreciate it. With VR you can get up close, and you come away with insight and understanding that are way more memorable and durable than the physical thing.The Social PotentialOnline gaming (of both the VR and the non-VR varieties) is currently connecting people in ways that were never before possible. Games like VR Chat allow for people from all over the world to form human connections in nightclub-like settings as idealized avatars of themselves. (Are we still sure that flesh-and-blood human connection is the only kind that makes people feel good?)Being able to express yourself in ways and in settings that are impossible in the physical world is just one of the many advantages that online gaming has over real-world travel. Another is that pretty much anyone can be there. World of Warcraft, for example, has connected millions of people for more than a decade.So many people, in fact, are now inhabiting these virtual worlds that Rough Guides has begun launching guidebooks for exploring them (well, ebooks) and musicians are performing concerts within them.Cost EffectivenessThere thousands of games that offer these great experiences and online connections for PCs and consoles, and many of them completely free. These offer real-time feedback and instant gratification. Luxury travel if obviously expensive and arguably offers less enjoyment — at least less of that immediate dopamine rush of reward.Now let’s look deeper.Can Games Be a Force for Good in the World Just Like Travel?The first thing we think of with games, just as with travel, is escape. That’s valid, but there’s more. Gaming involves learning to follow different rules, to engage in problem-solving, to enjoy play and surprise, sure, but also to end up on a path of growth, personal development, discoveries of a different culture, and a human connection with friends and strangers from all over the world.As Gabe Zichermann explained in a TED Talk, games make kids smarter. They increase what’s known as “fluid intelligence,” the result of a five-step path that involves seeking novelty, challenging yourself, thinking creatively, doing things the hard way, and being part of a network. (Consider World of Warcraft, where kids are expected to chat in text and voice, operate a character, follow long- and short-time objectives, and deal with their parents interrupting them all the time.) This might explain the Flynn Effect, in which, since 1990, crystalline intelligence has been stable or falling while fluid intelligence has been rising faster and faster.Games are the primary source of entertainment for Generation G — a cohort of 126 million millennial gamers and counting. (And before we write this off as some silliness for kids, let’s remember that the average age of gamers is now 33.) And that audience is demanding gamification in other parts of their life — think of the dashboard of a Prius, which constantly shows you how green your journey is.Gamers inhabit their virtual worlds for extended periods of time. Each year, they’re spending far more time in these worlds than they are traveling physically. It’s possible that real-world travel might just be an irritation — a disconnection from their other world, the virtual one.Gaming Can Make a Better WorldGame designer Jane McGonical argued exactly this in a TED Talk a decade ago. In her view, gamers are “super empowered hopeful individuals” who have four traits: urgent optimism (the desire to act immediately to tackle a challenge), connection to the social fabric (bonds of trust and cooperation), blissful productivity (being happier working than relaxing), and epic meaning (a connection to something bigger than themselves — for example, the second biggest wiki is for World of Warcraft, with some 80,000 articles).Games also help us avoid what the Guardian identified as the top five regrets of the dying. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”: parents who spend time gaming with their kids have closer relationships. “I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends”: Farmville, for example, is a game you play with friends. “I wish I’d let myself be happier”: Games can be more effective than drugs for anxiety and depression. “I wish I’d lived a life true to my dreams instead of what others expected of me”: Games are compelling.“I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self”: What do you think an avatar is?If you were to go to a game developers conference, you’d likely hear conversations about the same topics as at a luxury travel show: emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding, and feeling. Virtual worlds can be perfect — more beautiful and rich than the world around us. The best games give us opportunities for empathy — shared adversity and opportunity — and they can teach us to respect each other, to understand the problems we’re all facing in the real world.When gaming, people feel like the best selves. They’re inspired to collaborate, to cooperate, to stick with a problem for as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again. How many of us really manage to do all that in real life?So What Can the Travel Industry Learn from All This?Well, to start, let’s recognize the competition. Game companies are hiring brilliant designers and spending millions to create products that are maximized for addiction. An entire generation has been brought up with these games as a steady part of their lives.That means that travel is already a disruption from their routines. So it had better be worth it. This is where META Travel — that is, travel that makes you a better traveler — comes in. It’s the kind of travel that does everything a computer game would — it stokes emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding, and feeling.Or maybe META Travel is travel that does everything that travel does and everything a computer game would. Neal Stephenson called this the Metaverse in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and it could help us with the necessary shift in perception.Frankly, the real world has some catching up to do. No, I’m sorry: Travel professionals have some catching up to do.How Do We Make Real-World Travel More Like Virtual Worlds?It’s worth remembering what real-world travel can do. It makes us healthier, with studies showing that people who do not travel have high risks of heart attack and death. It relieves stress and promotes creativity, especially when international travelers are purposeful about engaging. ‘Travel boosts happiness and satisfaction, lowers the risk of depression, and promotes overall wellbeing. It can help strengthen personal bonds, improve job performance, stave off burnout, allow for a feeling of escape, follow different rules.Just like video games, travel can and should offer play, surprise, growth, personal development, transformation, interaction with different cultures, and human connection.What if travel people deliberately used the same techniques as game designers? What if travel people helped their clients travel better? What if travel people played more of an active role in how people spend their time, relax, grow, or transform as they travel?We should all be thinking about these questions. After all, consumers have lately had a lot of time on their hands to think about how important travel is to them and why. And since many of them have taken a pause from traveling, perhaps this is our opportunity to rethink our products.Whether we like it or not, gaming is starting to become serious competition for travel. And if that’s so, how long will it take for AI to start doing the jobs of travel advisors? (Siri, Alexa, and Cortana already know more about us than most people do.)That doesn’t mean we should give up. Quite the contrary. But we do need to look outside the travel fishbowl for inspiration. As legendary adman Howard Gossage said, “I don’t know who invited water but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” So let’s think bigger. Let’s look to gaming, VR, AR, AI, and Silicon Valley to deliver more for our clients and ensure our own survival.

The other day, I heard two guys talking about a horrendous experience they’d just returned from. They’d been traveling behind enemy lines, been taken in by generous locals, crawled through caves, and found themselves in underground tunnels, from which they had to escape under enemy fire. I figured they were shell-shocked mercenaries back from an overseas mission.

It turned out, they had been playing The Elder Scrolls V. Skyrim on their computers.

And for them, it wasn’t just some game. Their retelling was so vivid that it was clearly real for them. It was just a different kind of reality.

It was also the closest thing to a happy, free, and unconflicted conversation about travel I’ve heard all year. It was certainly a nice change from all the lamenting and handwringing about how COVID-19 has blindsided all of us in the travel industry.

These days, of course, the luxury travel industry is suffering immensely. Not only is there a global pandemic but also an ever-changing patchwork of global travel restrictions and more than a little real or feared economic distress. The year 2020 will go down as many things, but “the year that we stopped traveling” will be one of them. People decided to hunker down at home, and quite a lot of them picked up a gaming console.

This is on top of the multitudes who already were. In his 2019 TED Talk about the transformative power of video games, entrepreneur Herman Narula pointed out that there were 2.6 billion gamers that same year, up from 1.6 billion in 2014 (and less than who-knows-how-many in this weird socially distanced year). Video games, he argued, are suddenly a medium like film or literature, and they’re in the midst of a full-on renaissance.

It’s easy to whine, to complain, to give up, to lament that fictional worlds, VR, and AR can never replace real, in-the-flesh travel. But where does that get us? What if we tried to learn something from the massive growing world of gaming instead? What if we saw this as a time to look beyond ourselves, our companies, and our industry? What if we noticed the relentless trends and let them inspire us to do better — to revisit, to reimagine, to deliver more, to reject the conventions and raise the bar?

First, let’s consider three big advantages of video games.

Immersion

Video games and VR allow people to see and experience places in the world that would otherwise be impossible or near-impossible due to various circumstances — COVID-19, certainly, but also the high costs of travel, the time it takes, the difficulty of obtaining visas. They also allow for a sort of time travel, in which players find themselves in real-world historical places and events such as ancient Greece, World War II Germany, or onboard the Titanic.

Many travel experiences in the virtual world are enhanced versions of their real-world counterparts. And sometimes they’re just better. Take the VR Mona Lisa experience. It’s a big improvement over the reality of going to Paris, queuing for the Louvre, and peering over the heads of hundreds of other tourists to get a glimpse of something that’s behind bullet-proof glass and so far away you can’t really appreciate it. With VR you can get up close, and you come away with insight and understanding that are way more memorable and durable than the physical thing.

The Social Potential

Online gaming (of both the VR and the non-VR varieties) is currently connecting people in ways that were never before possible. Games like VR Chat allow for people from all over the world to form human connections in nightclub-like settings as idealized avatars of themselves. (Are we still sure that flesh-and-blood human connection is the only kind that makes people feel good?)

Being able to express yourself in ways and in settings that are impossible in the physical world is just one of the many advantages that online gaming has over real-world travel. Another is that pretty much anyone can be there. World of Warcraft, for example, has connected millions of people for more than a decade.

So many people, in fact, are now inhabiting these virtual worlds that Rough Guides has begun launching guidebooks for exploring them (well, ebooks) and musicians are performing concerts within them.

Cost Effectiveness

There thousands of games that offer these great experiences and online connections for PCs and consoles, and many of them completely free. These offer real-time feedback and instant gratification. Luxury travel if obviously expensive and arguably offers less enjoyment — at least less of that immediate dopamine rush of reward.

Now let’s look deeper.

Can Games Be a Force for Good in the World Just Like Travel?

The first thing we think of with games, just as with travel, is escape. That’s valid, but there’s more. Gaming involves learning to follow different rules, to engage in problem-solving, to enjoy play and surprise, sure, but also to end up on a path of growth, personal development, discoveries of a different culture, and a human connection with friends and strangers from all over the world.

As Gabe Zichermann explained in a TED Talk, games make kids smarter. They increase what’s known as “fluid intelligence,” the result of a five-step path that involves seeking novelty, challenging yourself, thinking creatively, doing things the hard way, and being part of a network. (Consider World of Warcraft, where kids are expected to chat in text and voice, operate a character, follow long- and short-time objectives, and deal with their parents interrupting them all the time.) This might explain the Flynn Effect, in which, since 1990, crystalline intelligence has been stable or falling while fluid intelligence has been rising faster and faster.

Games are the primary source of entertainment for Generation G — a cohort of 126 million millennial gamers and counting. (And before we write this off as some silliness for kids, let’s remember that the average age of gamers is now 33.) And that audience is demanding gamification in other parts of their life — think of the dashboard of a Prius, which constantly shows you how green your journey is.

Gamers inhabit their virtual worlds for extended periods of time. Each year, they’re spending far more time in these worlds than they are traveling physically. It’s possible that real-world travel might just be an irritation — a disconnection from their other world, the virtual one.

Gaming Can Make a Better World

Game designer Jane McGonical argued exactly this in a TED Talk a decade ago. In her view, gamers are “super empowered hopeful individuals” who have four traits: urgent optimism (the desire to act immediately to tackle a challenge), connection to the social fabric (bonds of trust and cooperation), blissful productivity (being happier working than relaxing), and epic meaning (a connection to something bigger than themselves — for example, the second biggest wiki is for World of Warcraft, with some 80,000 articles).

Games also help us avoid what the Guardian identified as the top five regrets of the dying. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”: parents who spend time gaming with their kids have closer relationships. “I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends”: Farmville, for example, is a game you play with friends. “I wish I’d let myself be happier”: Games can be more effective than drugs for anxiety and depression. “I wish I’d lived a life true to my dreams instead of what others expected of me”: Games are compelling.“I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self”: What do you think an avatar is?

If you were to go to a game developers conference, you’d likely hear conversations about the same topics as at a luxury travel show: emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding, and feeling. Virtual worlds can be perfect — more beautiful and rich than the world around us. The best games give us opportunities for empathy — shared adversity and opportunity — and they can teach us to respect each other, to understand the problems we’re all facing in the real world.

When gaming, people feel like the best selves. They’re inspired to collaborate, to cooperate, to stick with a problem for as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again. How many of us really manage to do all that in real life?

So What Can the Travel Industry Learn from All This?

Well, to start, let’s recognize the competition. Game companies are hiring brilliant designers and spending millions to create products that are maximized for addiction. An entire generation has been brought up with these games as a steady part of their lives.

That means that travel is already a disruption from their routines. So it had better be worth it. This is where META Travel — that is, travel that makes you a better traveler — comes in. It’s the kind of travel that does everything a computer game would — it stokes emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding, and feeling.

Or maybe META Travel is travel that does everything that travel does and everything a computer game would. Neal Stephenson called this the Metaverse in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and it could help us with the necessary shift in perception.

Frankly, the real world has some catching up to do. No, I’m sorry: Travel professionals have some catching up to do.

How Do We Make Real-World Travel More Like Virtual Worlds?

It’s worth remembering what real-world travel can do. It makes us healthier, with studies showing that people who do not travel have high risks of heart attack and death. It relieves stress and promotes creativity, especially when international travelers are purposeful about engaging. ‘

Travel boosts happiness and satisfaction, lowers the risk of depression, and promotes overall wellbeing. It can help strengthen personal bonds, improve job performance, stave off burnout, allow for a feeling of escape, follow different rules.

Just like video games, travel can and should offer play, surprise, growth, personal development, transformation, interaction with different cultures, and human connection.

What if travel people deliberately used the same techniques as game designers? What if travel people helped their clients travel better? What if travel people played more of an active role in how people spend their time, relax, grow, or transform as they travel?

We should all be thinking about these questions. After all, consumers have lately had a lot of time on their hands to think about how important travel is to them and why. And since many of them have taken a pause from traveling, perhaps this is our opportunity to rethink our products.

Whether we like it or not, gaming is starting to become serious competition for travel. And if that’s so, how long will it take for AI to start doing the jobs of travel advisors? (Siri, Alexa, and Cortana already know more about us than most people do.)

That doesn’t mean we should give up. Quite the contrary. But we do need to look outside the travel fishbowl for inspiration. As legendary adman Howard Gossage said, “I don’t know who invited water but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” So let’s think bigger. Let’s look to gaming, VR, AR, AI, and Silicon Valley to deliver more for our clients and ensure our own survival.

Dev Kumar
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