RESTART MED! highlights examples of good tourism practices in Spain

RESTART MED! learns from MED GAIMS in Spain

In October Vilanova i la Geltrú presented the Agency of Secrets initiative, an interactive and gamified experience that allows people to rediscover the municipality through 10 analogue, digital and virtual reality games. It is the largest project of tourism promotion through gamification at state level and its main objective is to increase the number of tourists that the municipality receives.

These 10 games are developed face-to-face in Vilanova i la Geltrú through mobile applications, board games, physical guides and, also, the virtual reality program. Agency of Secrets is made up of game experiences that are very different from each other, with some requiring walking routes, looking for symbols hidden in the town or in its museums or visiting places that could not be seen without virtual reality glasses.

The 10 games can be played individually, but they are all interconnected and form a fictional story, although some parts are inspired by real events linked to Vilanova i la Geltrú. The story is based on the premise that the user is an agent of the Agency of Secrets, an agency dedicated to revealing the town's best-kept secrets.

With this new and innovative tool, since there is no gamified alternative with this amount of games and level of interconnection, we want to create a memorable tourist experience that allows people to get to know Vilanova and la Geltrú.

Visitors and locals who want to become agents will be able to enter its streets, enjoy the most well-kept corners and travel through time moving to different eras of the town, while playing. In total, the 10 games of the Agency of Secrets project encompass 35 km of routes, 267 puzzles and 460 points of interest.

Xavier Socías, Project Manager & Gamification Advisor of the MedGaims Project, explained that the main objectives of this innovative initiative are "the promotion of gamification among the tourism managers of the destinations; the creation of work thanks to hackathon processes and external game designers and to provide, thanks to games, new tools to destinations to increase tourist flow”. These factors, he pointed out, "will also help meet one of the city's strategic challenges, which is deseasonalizing tourism".

RESTART MED! as a capitalization project wanted to provide this information to the RESTART MED! followers so they are aware of the great work and resources created under MED GAIMS.