From Game of Thrones to game of sites/sights: Reconfiguring a transnational cinematic node in Ireland's e-tourism

The adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s popular fantasy novels (1996-ongoing) into a TV series has been a marketing enterprise with calculated consequences. Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Malta, Scotland, Croatia, Iceland, the United States, Spain and Morocco, and rolled over to six successful seasons by HBO (2011-ongoing), the Game of Thrones developed into a popular culture in its own right. However, the transnational nature of its filmed locations and the ‘Oriental’ feel of its mesmerising music (composer: Ramin Djawadi) seem to have transposed the series’ fantastic plot of family intrigue and power games onto real territorial contexts of tourist policy-making. This study illuminates the Northern Irish political-cultural context of cinematic tourism to consider how the Game of Thrones’ hyper-real plot (of kings, royal families, dragons and witches) informed territorialised claims over tourist flows in the province’s filmed locations. Defined by folk legends and gifted with natural riches, these Northern Irish sites are implicated both in World Heritage complexities and the ethno-national sensibilities of the island’s ‘troubled’ histories. The study examines how the series’ disparate filmed sites (its territorially existing ‘node’ that spreads across countries and continents) are currently being ‘reconfigured’ (interpreted) as Irish cultural capital (a ‘heritage node’) online, in sites regulated by transnational, Northern Irish and Irish e-tourist providers. Drawing on combinations of these filmed Northern Irish places’ thanatic heritage matrix (their legends, fantastic-literary and real-natural imagery) and the series’ synaesthetic (multi-sensory) content, e-tourist sites contribute to synergies between capitalism and nationalism. The study concludes that the production of such e-tourist flows produces, in turns, highly politicised mobilities, whose synaesthetic digitality enhances especially, but not exclusively, nation-building’s ocular properties. It is argued that Northern Ireland’s Games of Thrones mobilities market tourism’s quotidian events while also reiterating the nation’s sacred time and essentialised existence.