The Belfast Golf Trail Gamification
To celebrate The 148th Open coming to Northern Ireland, Belfast One hosted ‘The Great Belfast Tee Off’. An activity in Belfast City Centre including free mini-golf, live music, golf simulators and more! Brilliant Trails had to get involved. Our team worked together on the gamification of Belfast City Centre. Brilliant Trails designed a new gamification experience. Taking visitors on an adventure around the City Centre and Cathedral Quarters with our Golf Trail.
Visitors were given the challenge to solve the clues to find out the names of all 18 holes across the city. The aim of the challenge is to answer the questions to decipher the final answer. Visitors then submitted their entry form at the end of the trail to be in with the chance of winning a £200 family prize package!
What does ‘gamifying the visitor experience exactly mean?
Gamifying the visitor’s experience allows to increase the visitor’s interest in the place, the city, the country she/he is visiting. So we use several mechanisms inspired by paper chases, board games, video games, escape games and alternate reality games. This improves the visitor’s way of engaging in a touristic experience. For example, hiding a clue in a place to make visitors look around more carefully and see details is a way of gamifying their experience.
2. How can this work for destinations?
Every destination struggles with the idea of conveying an authentic, complete, exciting yet comprehensible image of itself. Sometimes the tourism offer appears as too diversified. Lack of resources prevents the visitor from going further into her/his discover Imagine gaming techniques as tools to connect places, layers of knowledge and people. Thanks to the inherently intuitive nature of forever existing games, the destination is adequately conveyed to the public at large!
3. Do you think it could work for any destination, or is it dependent on the product offer?
It might exist as many ways of gamifying a visitor’s experience as there are existing destinations! The level of gamification you will choose will depend on what or whom you are targeting. You don’t have to go for a costly, cutting-edge technological touristic experience to gamify a destination. As long as your thinking process starts with your existing material and a clear goal, you can sprinkle the gaming mechanism on any location. Some might not even notice that you gamified the whole experience!
4. What is needed to gamify an experience?
Before gamifying, be sure you need it! Be aware of your goal, strength, weaknesses and available resources (culturally and humanly speaking), to be sure the best way to achieve your goal is by gamifying.
The first thing needed is the story you want to share and how you engage your target. Everything comes from the narrative you are setting. The gaming techniques you will pick, the medium you will elect to carry your story out, the technology you will use, the communication campaign everything comes from that storyline. Then you need the content. This includes edited content (informative, heritage and nature-related, etc.) and entered data (statistics on flows, user data, etc.). The public is also the creator of content. The mass of this content becomes more productive over time, and it’s essential to identify the content that will be delivered and used.
With a storyline and content, you will have the big picture and can use gamification to increase in audience and retention!
If you like the sound of our Belfast Golf Trail, check out our Fairy Trails. Follow the clues and directions to help the fairies find their missing fairy dust!