Could the next big thing on tourism trends going to come straight out of a Video Game? That is, tourism based less around video-games as an attraction (a Sonic The Hedgehog centrifuge ride encountered on your Florida Holidays) than the idea that by featuring famous (and not so famous) locations, people might be inspired to travel to a destination. Films and books inspire tourism: consider Austrian Sound of Music tours and sightseeing as one example.

With photo-realism on the horizon and a desire to tell stories that are rooted in the real-world, games have been turning to real-world locations for inspiration or wholesale inclusion as gameplay environments. Even when entirely photo-realistic, experiencing these locations first-hand is never going to be entirely replaced. In fact, the power of interactive media is arguably that they create interest in other texts and entities outside the game.

It was recently reported that Rolling Stones records saw a significant spike in sales that coincided with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops. COD:BLOPS featured the Stones’ 1968 hit song Sympathy for the Devil as background music to an action sequence and to accompanying advertising. Clearly, people were reminded or even introduced to a music library that has been performing well for forty years. Is it not entirely possible therefore that games could have the same kind of influence over the travel habits of their players?

You could even point to a tiny pool of evidence that the phenomenon is already occuring. The youtube video ‘Deus Ex IRL’, for instance, shows a man on New York holidays, set to music from the 2000 title Deus Ex, which had parallel scenes of the Statue of Liberty and Battery Park. Clearly the tourist pull of these landmarks is far beyond the powers of the game, but it is simply interesting that there are fans out there making these kind of associations at all.

Perhaps a potential prat-fall of this concept is simply that video-games aren’t dealing with their locations all that respectfully. This is taken to an extreme if we’re to assume that anyone would ever be influenced to go on Washington DC or Las Vegas holidays as a direct result of playing a Fallout game. Until games start treating the locations with a little more respect, perhaps the mainstream appeal of the ‘video game tourism’ concept won’t be realised.