IFTM alumna Ms. Gina Lam Mei Peng, a graduate from IFTM’s Tourism Retail and Marketing Management Bachelor’s Degree Programme (Chinese medium), was one of the big winners at the 2nd Zhuhai-Macao College Students Entrepreneurship Competition, held in November. Her team got a gold prize in the Zhuhai-Macao Cultural Tourism Creative Competition, a new section within the overall event.
Ms. Lam’s project proposed use of live-action role-playing (LARP) games so visitors could have “an immersive experience in tourism spots”.
In LARP games, participants physically portray their characters, usually in costume and with props, interacting with other players in real world environments.
Ms. Lam says it was hard to stand out from the crowd in the competition. She states that being awarded a gold prize at the contest was a result of her years of study in IFTM, the guidance received during that period from the Institute’s academics, and IFTM’s focus on improving student core thinking and problem-solving skills. Ms. Lam says she would like to express her gratitude to her lecturers, sharing with them the joy of winning an award at the Zhuhai-Macao Cultural Tourism Creative Competition.
The IFTM graduate highlights that her experience as a student at IFTM was of great help in preparing for the entrepreneurship competition. Ms. Lam says the contest was in parts similar to academic projects she had worked on for courses at the Institute.
“We were required to consider different aspects, including carrying out market research, knowing how to start a business, figuring out our market-positioning strengths, and drafting a financial budget,” she explains. “The knowledge I got from IFTM in these areas helped me a lot.”
Another team featuring participation from IFTM people also got a gold prize in the Zhuhai-Macao Cultural Tourism Creative Competition, with a project on hospitality.
The overall event took place concurrently with the 7th Zhuhai University Student Entrepreneurship Competition.
The Zhuhai-Macao Cultural Tourism Creative Competition aims to encourage participants to develop innovative ideas that can advance tourism in Zhuhai, next door in Guangdong Province, as well as in Macao. It requires teams to focus on the “sharing of resources, integrated development of industries and exchange of talent”, between the 2 cities.
More than 50 teams registered for the competition. After a pre-selection phase, a total of 20 teams was selected for the finals.
The advancing teams benefitted from a 3-day training camp in Zhuhai. As part of the training camp, instructors provided participants with suggestions for them to improve their projects.
Rethinking the models for cultural tourism
Ms. Lam learned about the Zhuhai-Macao Cultural Tourism Creative Competition soon after she graduated from IFTM. She decided to enrol in the competition, teaming up with 2 people from a different higher education institution, with the aim of rethinking the existing development models for cultural tourism.
“The competition focuses on developing cultural tourism in Zhuhai and Macao,” she says. “We were trying to find a way to arouse teenagers’ interest in heritage and the historic centres of the 2 places.”
Ms. Lam points out that the appeal of cultural tourism goes beyond the fun of travel itself: it offers visitors an understanding of local culture. She says the most important thing for successful cultural tourism products is to strike the right note with tourists, turning them into lovers and promoters of culture in general.
Apart LARP games’ role in promoting visits to monuments and scenic spots, the IFTM alumna argues that such games, through their immersive features, can let visitors gain a deep understanding of each heritage site. On top of that, LARP products can help the development of ancillary industries, she says.
The LARP game project consisted of 3 elements: “content creation”; “cultural tourism product intellectual property output”; and a “script trading hub”. The project aimed to achieve 3 main goals: “promoting the flow of people, driving economic efficiency, and helping the spread of historical culture”, between Macao and Zhuhai. That was to be achieved via the integration of the ‘new’ and the ‘ancient’, i.e., melding new ways of interaction promoted by LARP games with the background history and stories of each selected site. The ultimate target of the overall project would be to achieve cultural dissemination and economic benefits.
One of the highlights of the proposal by Ms. Lam’s team was the establishment of a trading hub for scripts for LARP games, to promote the development of new talent in this field in Macao and Zhuhai. The group’s proposal envisioned the drafting of LARP game scripts tailor-made for each chosen tourism site around Macao and Zhuhai, but with a common story plot, to offer a variety of options for tours, in an immersive, game-playing format.
“We selected a total of 7 historic sites and 7 guest houses in Macao and Zhuhai, as the first spots to include in the trial. The scripts are based on stories of people and historical events in Zhuhai and Macao. Young people can physically be ‘involved’ in a historical event through the LARP game, thus having a ‘dialogue’ with history,” says Ms. Lam.
To prepare the project, each member of her team was given a specific task. “I was responsible for market research, to conduct analyses based on observations of market trends, compiled data and consumers’ preferences,” Ms. Lam says. One of the other team members focused on the financial part of the proposal, while the third, with an interest in Chinese language and literature, worked on scriptwriting and copywriting tasks.
Ms. Lam says her team hopes their project can contribute to promotion of cultural tourism in Macao and Zhuhai, through LARP games with creative scripts that combine Macao’s unique East-meets-West characteristics and culture.
