From QR codes to city quests: Is travel becoming a game?

Travel used to mean folding and dotting physical paper maps, dog-earing guidebooks and a willingness to get lost. Today we’re scanning QR codes for dinner menus, unlocking augmented reality creatures in public squares or chasing digital badges and leaderboards across a foreign city.

Welcome to “gami-vacation”.

From Pokémon GO tourism in the iconic year of 2016 — where players plan trips around rare character sightings — to other global Geocaching adventures that turn suburbs and city centres into treasure maps, gaming mechanics are reshaping how people explore.

Gamified experiences tap into the brain’s reward system, specifically the release of dopamine which is the neurotransmitter associated with motivation and pleasure. So, the appeal is a no brainer. Points, badges and “rare finds” actually trigger us to keep playing mobile games.

When Pokémon GO launched, it was downloaded more than 500 million times in its first year and, at its peak, had more daily active users than Twitter. You could say it caused a little chaos at first. Celebrities including Ariana Grande publicly shared their catches, underscoring just how mainstream the augmented reality phenomenon had become.

Meanwhile, geocaching (which predates most social media!) now claims millions of active participants worldwide, each searching for hidden containers using GPS coordinates. The hobby has sparked global anniversary challenges drawing thousands of participants and environmentally focused “Cache In Trash Out” clean-up events, turning exploration into these big interactive and sharable experiences.

Other location-based games have followed, including Ingress, which turns cities into faction-based battlegrounds, Pikmin Bloom, which rewards users for walking and planting virtual flowers, and Monster Hunter Now, which overlays real streets with roaming creatures to battle.

So why is this happening? Part of the answer lies in the way younger generations consume the world. Millennials and Gen Z were raised on their phones and travel, which was once defined by spontaneity, now competes with an attention economy engineered around constant stimulation.

New Zealander-turned-Perth local (and Gen Zer) Max says he enjoys using the game-like fitness app Strava, which allows runners to track their progress and compete for leaderboard positions with users around the world.

“It’s not until afterwards whether you know if you’ve made it on the leaderboard or not, but it is a fun way of motivating yourself to run,” says Max.

“Strava has this thing called “segments” which are little sections of frequently used routes highlighted on Strava’s map. So, when you go to a new place, you can achieve records on all sorts of new segments. And if you’re really fast, you can even get on the leaderboard for that segment with other runners around the world,” he explains.

“I think it adds a bit of purpose. But the main reason I like running on holiday is because it’s the best way to see a new city.

“Instead of spending hours on a cramped bus or a train you get to spend some time out there exploring for yourself,” he says.

The only problem Max ran into was poor connectivity, which occasionally turned carefree runner’s bliss into moments of uncertainty in unfamiliar places.

“The advent of the eSIM has been a real game changer for running because it means basically no matter where I am, I can check my maps,” says Max.

“I’ve done runs down alley ways in Sri Lanka and tiny little towns in rural Morocco and have been able to check how far I’ve been going and where I need to go next. Maps show you where to go but it doesn’t show you where it’s safe to go, so I have found myself in some dodgy back alleys around the globe where I’m very glad to have had a good connection.”

So, as it stands, modern travel has become some sort of a game. Not in the sense of winning or losing, but in how we move, interact and experience the world.

Perhaps the ultimate question isn’t whether travel can be gamified, but whether we want it to be. In blending play with exploring the world, these experiences challenge the way we see a city, a landmark, or even a run down an unfamiliar (perhaps a little dodgy) street. Maybe for some it adds excitement and purpose; for others, it risks turning spontaneity into strategy. Either way, the boundaries between tourism and gameplay are blurring.

To save yourself from having poor connection on your next trip, services like Yesim promise to connect you to over 800 local operators worldwide, automatically switching to 4G or 5G networks in each country, meaning you’re connected from the moment you land, whether you’re gami-vacationing in Tokyo, or running through Morocco in the desert. For more information, visit the website.