When you’re immersed in a game – even an online game that you’re playing with friends – it’s easy to feel that you’ve escaped into some sort of digital bubble. In this world, you might feel as though you don’t have any sort of engagement with the physical world at all – an altogether opposite feeling to when you’re in the midst of a busy dining experience with your friends.
Are these two experiences entirely disconnected? Or is there some way in which the world of online gaming has come to influence the realm of dining and hospitality?
Immersion for Best Results
If you’re talking about the experiential similarities between the activities, it might be best to start with how you can get the most out of either of them.
One of the most regularly cited aspects of gaming when it comes to explaining why people enjoy it so much is the aspect of immersion. For many people, this might be more a feature of offline gaming than online but even in the latter, getting lost in a digital world with your friends can be incredibly rewarding. However, the important aspect is that you’re completely focused on the moment and enjoying the activity for what it is. The same is true of any hospitality or dining experience – spending too much time distracted can detract from what you’re getting out of that present moment experience.
Digital Integration in Hospitality
There are, of course, several hospitality venues where it’s expected that the patrons not only have phones, but also use them as a part of the ordering process. It might be that there is a QR code on the table that they can use to order, or it might be that there are specific ordering machines which feature their own operating system for customers to engage with. While it might be a stretch to consider these aspects gaming by any metric, it is a union between the digital world and the physical one – a way for digital entertainment and convenience to further entrench themselves within a person’s life.
Of course, this isn’t something that describes all hospitality experiences, and some might instead pride themselves on maintaining a more traditional or digital-free approach.
Intersected Venues
If you consider casinos hospitality venues, it can be interesting to observe how this has been offered an entirely digital alternative through online casinos like Ruby Fortune Casino Canada – stripping away the social aspect and instead offering a sharper focus on the games themselves. This, naturally, isn’t something that would work for all venues – it becomes hard to see, outside of delivery systems, how it would operate for restaurants, and even then, it couldn’t apply to hotels. However, there are also restaurants, bars and hotels that might embrace gaming as a theme. Arcade bars might feature a more novel type of gaming compared to what’s available through smartphones, but they still feature a way for patrons to interact with this hobby while getting everything they expect from the venue itself.