Geometry-based game 'Flatland ARG!!!' shapes up for Game Art Festival debut

The right to wave scepters and wear armor does not solely belong to medieval kings and knights. With the addition of LED color tracking, smartphones and a video camera, this augmented reality becomes a possibility.

Over the past few years, UCLA’s Game Lab has been developing its independent game project “Flatland ARG!!!,” an augmented reality game that takes its name and concept from the 1884 satirical novella “Flatland” by Edwin Abbott. Augmented reality seeks to intertwine the virtual and physical worlds through the application of video, imagery and data. Although the game still needs some work, the Game Lab is pushing to complete and present “Flatland ARG!!!” on May 10 at this year’s Game Art Festival held at the Broad Arts Center.

While “Flatland” centers around a two-dimensional world inhabited by lines, triangles, squares and other polygonal shapes vying for an existential purpose, the game follows a more action-oriented style that demands teamwork and a healthy dose of imagination for success.

“I feel a lot of games really underdevelop team-based coordination, but it’s an important part of (“Flatland ARG!!!”) that you really don’t see anywhere else,” said Eddo Stern, the game’s head designer, Game Lab director and associate professor of Design | Media Arts.

Stern also said that even though the game will be entered into the Game Art Festival in the coming weeks, it will not represent his complete vision for the game because of time constraints.

Once at its full potential, “Flatland ARG!!!” will support two teams of five competing by “battling,” “building” and “scanning” for resources in an area the size of a soccer field. The screens of Nokia smartphones strapped to the inside of cast scepters act as the players’ point of contact, projecting the geometric shape that represents their location on the field.

“Similar to the book, players don’t have a perception of reality; they don’t know they are geometric shapes,” said the game’s project manager Diana Ford. “So the only way they can find out what their real value is, in terms of point collection, is if they look at the screen.”

Players have to also wear foam torso and head pieces for tracking purposes and perform a variety of gestures with their scepters to collect points and win. Leveling up or collecting sides in the game is only possible through the gesture for “battle,” where players jab their scepters at opposing players.

Starting out as a triangle in the center of their screen, players gain sides with each successive hit and lose sides if attacked. Leveling evolves a player’s shape into a more complex polygon, allowing that player to collect more resources and eventually win the game.

According to Ford, this process is representative of the novella.

“The more sides that you have (in the novella), the more noble you are. So similarly in the actual game, the more sides you have, the more resources you can collect, and thus the greater advantage you have over other players,” Ford said.

While “Flatland ARG!!!” is blurring the lines between art and game, its technology is making new strides in the way of live tracking, said Game Lab manager David Elliott.

“We’ve made a lot of progress. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting better all the time. Our ideal outcome would be a tracking system robust enough to work outdoors with a reliable setup. If we were able to do that, you could use the same tracking system for generating professional sporting statistics,” Elliott said.

As a very visual showing, Elliott said “Flatland ARG!!!” should be just as fun to watch as it is to play.

“It’s really a spectator sport. In its intended context, at an art or independent games festival, it really presents itself as a fantastic spectacle,” Elliott said. “All technology aside, it’s more about putting on a show for an audience, and it’s a pretty easy win in that regard.”