Tourism and Simulacrum: The Computational Economy of Algorithmic Destinations

The paper establishes a conceptual and methodological link between destinations and simulacrum through gamified tourism. As a paradigm, gamified tourism provides a rationale and a setting within which to apply computational economics to tourism, an approach amounting to tourism computability. Algorithmic destinations serve as “petri dishes” for real destinations. Utilizing rule sets that embody destination growth dynamics and visitor behavioural norms, seeding points in a cellular automata model (CA) were grown into algorithmic destinations. This is followed by a morphological transformation of geo-tagged satellite images into spatial points. The overlap of this additive and subtractive approach is at the core of tourism computability. Finally, the spatio-temporal dynamics of economic resilience was traced out through a visual phenomenology of algorithmic destinations. The gamification of tourism should be embraced as it holds up a flicker of hope for mature destinations, amidst the onset of museumification and increased commoditization of heritage sites. Gamification is treated as part of the reflexive cycle for destination authenticity; a notion that that Cohen (1988) alluded to in his discussion of emergent authenticity in destination image formation. Seen in this light, the museumification of Venice and the proliferation of its simulacrum, such as the Venetian Hotel in Macao and Venice-themed hotels across the globe, are prefigures and archetypes of a glorious age of gamified tourism.