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Introduction
Media-related tourism, broadly defined as visits or travel to places associated with books, authors, television and film, has been extensively studied in the past 20 years (Gartner, 1993; Busby and Klug, 2001; Iwashita, 2008; Mercille, 2005; Lee et al., 2008). The way different media shape images about destinations and influence tourism is of interest both from a marketing and a cultural standpoint. However, the literature tends to focus on a limited number of media, namely, on film and television’s (TV) ability to attract tourists through the portrayal of place and storyline (Beeton, 2006; Grihault, 2007; Joliveau, 2009; Riley et al., 1998).
As a result, an even bigger media’s impact on tourism has yet to be studied. On equal footing in terms of cultural relevance (Smith, 2011) and production costs with film and TV (Codère, 2016), video games represent a $100bn and fast-growing industry (Newzoo, 2017). Of interest is the fact that many of today’s games explore the virtual geography of cities and let players roam like tourists. Whether it is a walk around Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity or a drive through the streets of San Francisco in Watch Dogs 2, games enable players to experience cities in original ways.
This study attempts to make a theory-building contribution by advancing the conceptualization of media-related tourism through an original case application (Dooley, 2002). Specifically, using deductive content analysis (Krippendorff, 1980; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008), we review online entries for evidence of tourism-related activities associated with two popular city-based video games. The study’s starting point and theoretical anchor is the most documented form of media-induced tourism to date. For film and TV-induced tourists are defined as “people seeking sights or sites seen on the silver screen” (Busby and Klug, 2001, p. 316), we demonstrate that some people equally seek sights or sites seen in games and, therefore, establish the first evidence of “video game-induced tourism”. Our results expand the media-induced tourism literature into a new domain of application and open up what we believe is a promising line of research. This study is also relevant to destination marketers who may seek to collaborate with video games companies to enhance their sense of place, promote their brand and highlight the long-term tourism financial...