The Scoot – CBN (now known as Culture Victoria ) project explored the potential for location-based games to work across Melbourne’s key cultural sites: the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Museum, State Library of Victoria and the Arts Centre. Created by the artist Debra Polson it was produced and presented by ACMI, in collaboration with the five cultural organisations.

Scoot’s intention was to use the application of location based technologies to increase participation in the five key cultural organisations. It encouraged players to embrace through its play fragment of sites history and identity, to discover through the game paths the resources and offerings of each of the participating organisations and to take them to spaces that they may not find otherwise. It uses a ubiquitous form of personal technology to help create and foster a sense of belonging and ownership over the venues for the Scoot players.

Scoot is the result of Polson’s PhD studies (Lesser-known Worlds) and has run twice before in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Initially run in May 2004 at Queensland’s Creative Industry Precinct, the game launched the Precinct in Brisbane. Then, in April 2005, Deb and her Scoot team were commissioned by ACMI to run a second version of Scoot as part of ACMI’s continuing focus and exploration of games and game culture.

The launch of Games Lab in March 2005, saw ACMI with Australia’s only exhibition space dedicated entirely to games. ACMI also offers a strong and diverse program of events, workshops and educational resources. This created the perfect environment for the presentation of Scoot in 2005.

Scoot 2005 was played across ACMI, Federation Square and Artplay in Melbourne. Characters from the history of Federation Square became part of the game such as the infamous Gas and Fuel buildings and the notorious Magpie, The Professor. Upon completing the game, players could choose to participate in a drawing activity at Artplay where they created their own game character with magical powers.

The collaboration of Victoria’s major cultural organisations in an unprecedented creative partnership that enabled Scoot 2006 to be played in a larger area than ever before.

In its intentions to engage families with Melbourne’s key cultural organisations Scoot was very successful with a number of families commenting that this was the first time that their children had expressed a passion to visit these cultural centres. Play is designed so as the players could linger and explore the spaces as long as they wished. Many families would spend time exploring the venue before proceeding. Scoot 2005 and 2006 demonstrated how games can provide people with an engaging and innovative way to explore locations.

SCOOT was created by Debra Polson

Core Scoot Design and Development team were Yang Wong, Shu-Min Heng, David Wallace, Sheridah Puttick and Marcos Caceres.