Playing in a Virtual Tour of Tai Hom VillagePPT课件.docVIP

A Research-Theoretical Text to accompany Graduation Thesis Project: Playing in a Virtual Tour of Tai Hom Village SM4140 Graduation thesis 2006/2007 Critical Intermedia Laboratory The School of Creative Media The City University of Hong Kong Submitted on 23/04/2007 FU Wing-yan Lilian Adviser: LAI, Chiu Han Linda Walking, playing, retreat from everyday routine, and acquiring new knowledge about a place can be the four core components of tourism. At the end of my 3-month inventive ethnographic research, I have turned Tai Hom Village into a virtual tour, by which a visitor moves through space via seeing and playing games instead of physically walking. This project is inspired by my study exchange in Turkey last year in which I found out that the travel experience is very different from tourist discourse. As both a tourist and a resident, I saw both the noticeable and unseen part of an unknown place. I remember that as a tourist, a foreigner, I was curious about everything, everything looked so exotic, and everything was so different from Hong Kong. I was glad that I was able to explore the ‘real’ life style in Istanbul like what the tourist guide describe. But as time went by, my excitement disappeared gradually. Life became repetitive and monotonous. When travel became my everyday life, I was more confused for my identities and the nature of tourism. If travel is to break out from everyday life, does it mean that the exchange life is not traveling? What are the differences between taking a bus in Hong Kong and Istanbul? I have a lot of queries about the differences between everyday routine and tourism. Going back to the question of experiencing a foreign place, I discovered that it is almost impossible for me to know what is ‘factual’ of the local Turkish life. There is something which I could not understand, besides differences in cultural or national background; I also encountered barriers of language, daily custom, etc. As my identity is half-resident,