Workshop: location based gaming Date: Thursday September 30 2004, 3-6pm Venue: Electrofringe, Newcastle Presenters: Debra Polson and Marcos Caceres Entry: free SCOOT, a recent Location-Based Game design hosted in Brisbane, is a mixed reality experience designed to explore the potentials of a relatively new genre of location-based game design. SCOOT experiments with how to apply new forms of mobile technologies combined with digital media to examine new ways for people to interact in both physical and virtual spaces with particular interest in how effectively they enhance the relationships between location, participants and cultural activities... by increasing a participants sense of agency within a site and the ability to subvert the normal usages of public space. In this workshop, participants will be collaborating to design an alternate experience at sites in Newcastle using the methods used to design SCOOT. After an introduction into the origins and motivations of Location-Based Game and a demonstration of the various components for design and play, participants will select sites nearby and design possible pathways and interaction. The "nodes" making up the pathways will be marked out on a large map of Newcastle where participant groups will cooperate to design rules for 'node' relationships and for player engagement. Finally participants test their design and play the game, using an interface set up to receive both 'clues' and 'solves' via SMS. Debra Polson and Marcos Caceres Debra Polson currently lectures in the field of interaction design at Queensland University of Technology and is a project leader at the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). Debra has worked as an interface designer on multiple interactive children's games and various other multimedia productions and continues to design location-based games for various sites in Brisbane, including SCOOT and Cipher Valley. Her research interests lie in new hybrid forms of game play that blur the edges between the digital and physical realms. Marcos Caceres lectures in the field of interaction design at Queensland University of Technology and works as a systems integration consultant for various projects. Marcos' primary research interests lie in new-media communication and multi-modal interaction design.