Time: Tuesday, 09/Sept/2025: 4:00pm - 5:30pm Session Chair: Prof. Luisa Carbone |
The session aims to explore how digital innovations are redefining the discipline of geography by merging physical and digital reality. Gamification transforms the spatial experience by making the understanding of territories interactive and playful. Indeed, by integrating the immersive experiences offered by digital reality, it succeeds in presenting a new space that increasingly benefits from the effects of civic participation and social innovation.
The metaverse, with its immersive virtual spaces, is redefining geographical boundaries and social interactions, creating new digital worlds and offering new opportunities to rethink the way we interact with space and with others. Transhumanism goes further, integrating advanced technologies to extend human capabilities and redefine the interaction between body and space.
The session proposes a reflection on the future of geography, in constant tension between theory and practice, not static, but multidimensional and interdisciplinary, positioned in constant change on the two space-time axes that influence the way we inhabit and perceive places.
The session will therefore welcome scientific contributions that discuss the theoretical, practical and interpretive model of the discipline, immersed in a multi-verse society and coexisting outside space-time, where a geo-localised point can become a node of a Euclidean geometry, but also something else, something still alien, because it is imaginative.
Transforming Nature Exploration: Gamification for Awareness and Conservation
University of Bologna, Italy
Gamification is an engaging strategy that can motivate people to take action. A well-designed approach can transform any non-game activity into a playful and engaging experience. Due to its numerous benefits, gamification has been widely applied across various fields, from education to industry.
In recent years, several initiatives have explored gamification as a means to promote sustainable mobility (e.g., walking, cycling). These campaigns often leverage mobile apps, as smartphones are ideal for collecting georeferenced data. However, despite initial success, user engagement tends to decline over time, as gamification is typically focused on increasing extrinsic motivation through rewards, discounts, points, and similar incentives.
Building on this concept, we aim to take a step further by investigating how gamification can foster eco-tourism, transforming the in the nature experience into an interactive and playful journey. Specifically, our goal is to design a mobile app that encourages people to explore natural parks while simultaneously contributing to citizen science. Through this app, people can explore the territory and collect environmental data while enhancing their awareness of local biodiversity and its territory.
As a case study, we are focusing on the Po Delta Park, one of the most important wetlands in Europe and the largest in Italy. This vast ecosystem spans 64,000 hectares across two regions and hosts an extraordinary diversity of life, including over 400 animal species and nearly 1,000 plant species. Within this rich natural context, we are designing a mobile app that can be used exclusively while exploring the park. The app will provide real-time, location-based information on local biodiversity. While navigating the park, users will also be prompted to take pictures of flora and fauna, contributing to a shared gallery, evnetually accessible to both other participants and scientists. This feature will enable users to build a personal collection, unlocking different species and accessing augmented reality representations and informative content about each natural element.
By doing so, we aim to enhance awareness of local biodiversity and its vital role in our lives while offering an engaging and interactive way to explore natural environments and territories, levering on intrinsic motivation.
From Game to Reality - How Black Myth: Wukong Boosts Shanxi Tourism
University of Barcelona, Spain
Shanxi, one of China's most important Buddhist cultural tourism destinations, has faced sustainable development challenges in recent years due to over-commercialisation and the limitations of traditional tourism models. Conventional spatial experiences tend to be static and fail to effectively attract visitors who lack a deep connection to religion or culture.
The launch of the Black Myth: Wukong video game has breathed new life into cultural tourism in Shanxi through gamification. This video game - which integrates up to 27 Buddhist cultural heritage sites in Shanxi into a highly interactive digital narrative - topped the global charts on the day of its release and was awarded the prestigious ‘Best Action Game’ award at The Game Awards 2024. Gamification, by merging the virtual with the real, has strengthened the emotional connection with young and low religious audiences through interactive experiences. This phenomenon has had a direct impact on tourism: visits to iconic sites such as the Mahavira Hall of Xiaoxitian increased by 326% year-on-year on the first day of the 2024 Chinese Moon Festival holiday. The innovative combination of tangible heritage and immersive digital realities has redefined the way people experience culture and transformed the global perception of Shanxi's cultural space.
This study, based on the analysis of tourist visitation in the destination of Shanxi and visitors' ratings on social networks, aims to show how digital innovation and gamified platforms transform static cultural spaces into dynamic and multidimensional environments, breaking down traditional geographical boundaries. In the field of tourism promotion, this transformation boosts the dissemination of thematic tourism routes, enhances the international visibility of destinations, reinforces the global recognition of cultural heritage and is an exponent of the enormous potential of digital innovation to redefine new ways of conceptualising space in the future.
THE CONCEPT OF GAMIFICATION AND THE POTENTIAL EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON TOURISM IN ROMANIA
University of Bucharest, Romania
The concept of gamification is a new form of growth for various sectors of activity by introducing game design elements to create maximum involvement of the practitioner in the proposed activity. Tourism induced by video games represents a new form of tourism that is emerging as an opportunity for economic development. Due to its particular characteristics, the tourism induced by video games stands out as an attractive form and related to a special category of tourists, namely those who are part of the video-gaming industry. The purpose of the study is focused on the identification of the industries with applied elements of the concept of gamification. The authors pay particular attention to the identification and analysis of Romania's tourist attractiveness elements, within some games with references to the Romanian territory, based on a comparison between the frames presented in the game and frames from reality. At the same time, the development of the study also included the analysis of the evolution of tourism induced by video games by consulting the specialized literature. The main results of the study were highlighted by the identification of multiple assets of cultural identity and locations related to Romania within the videos games, thus shaping an innovative touristic image. In addition, the promotion of these elements of cultural identity through video games is a potential effect that can stimulate tourist motivation and the gamification process can bring new benefits and opportunities to the hospitality industry.