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Peter Molyneux is a man that needs no introduction to most gamers out there. The British game designer started his career back in 1984 and has created many hits over the years including Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park and the Fable series. He has gone from being a bedroom programmer to running two studios of his own - Bullfrog Productions and Lionhead Studios - and became the Creative Director of Microsoft's European games studios when they brought Lionhead back in 2006. Earlier this year, after Fable: The Journey was finally released, he announced he was leaving Microsoft to join his old Lionhead CTO Tim Rance and other gaming veterans in a new venture called 22Cans with the philosophy to "work on truly innovational and experimental ideas leading to the release of a new form of digital entertainment."
Their first experiment, "Curiosity - What's Inside The Cube" (to give it its full title — the subtitle was added to avoid confusion with the Mars rover) is part massively multiplayer online game, part social experiment and completely and utterly insane. The free app is available for both iOS and Android devices and when you first start it up you see a gently rotating cube (rather like a Borg ship), floating in a white room. You can spin the cube, pinch to zoom in and out and a tap will take you right into the surface of the cube. As you zoom in, you start to see the individual pixels of the image on the surface. But then it zooms you in further, revealing the pixels that make up the pixels of the image. And then again. When you are zoomed all the way in, each of these pixels becomes a "Cubelet" and the idea of the game is to chip away these cubelets with a tap of your finger.
Yup, that's it.
Tapping away the cubelets, one by one, until the whole layer is removed. And if you zoom back out of the cube, your mind will boggle at the number of cubelets that there are on each face. Millions and millions and millions of them. Luckily, you're not alone in your task as everyone playing the game all over the world is chipping away at the same cube, concurrently, in real time. But they're not really helping you. No, they're actually competing with you. Competing to be the one person who chips away the very last cubelet and wins the as yet unspecified, but supposedly life-changing, grand prize.
Apparently there are 64 billion cubelets in total, making around 2,000 layers, and each layer must be fully removed before the next layer becomes available. At the time of writing, the first layer had just gone - with over 100 million cubelets - and it took about a day to do it. If the last cubelet is really the center of the cube, we could be here a while.
To encourage participation and not just observation, tappers are rewarded with 'coins' for each cubelet removed - sometimes just one, sometimes hundreds. You can 'chain' your taps together for a kind of high score by removing a cubelet with consecutive taps, miss one though and you start again from zero. Bonus coins are awarded for clearing your screen and the amount varies just as much as the single cubelets, depending on your zoom level and how many where there when you started.
But what do you do with these coins? Spend them in the Curiosity store, of course. 100 coins buys you a peek at the game stats, where you can see how many people have signed up, how many cubelets have been destroyed, how many there are to go on the current layer, and so on.
Then there are the power ups. 5,000 coins gets you four 'Firecrackers,' which you can chain together to remove more cubelets. The next one is the 'bomb,' which gives you more destructive taps for eight seconds - but will set you back 115,000 coins. Then there are three chisels - Iron, Steel and Diamond, each one time-limited again. The iron one clears nine at a time, but costs 300,000 and the steel one clears 25 with each tap, but you'll have to hand over a cool million for it! The power of the Diamond Chisel hasn't been revealed, but given that it will cost THREE BILLION coins, I wonder if anyone will ever get one.
The experiment is very much in its early days and there are still many issues to be worked out. On release day, many users were having trouble logging in as the 22cans servers struggled to cope with the demand. Many more users have been complaining about their carefully hoarded stashes of coins disappearing randomly. Now that layer 2 is in play, a lot of people have seen a lot of crashes, but Molyneux and his team have been burning the midnight oil trying to solve all of these problems. Many times I've been carefully working on a section, trying to beat my highest chain, when a slight slide of the finger moves the screen instead of destroying a block. Or worse still, the whole lot suddenly vanishes as your copy of the cube syncs with the others and you realize you've been working on the same section. I played for about 5 minutes whilst away from the wi-fi and used up about 40% of my battery as the game constantly checked in with the server over the 3G network - and became a nice hard warmer in the process.
More interesting though is where the 'game' is heading. It's the antithesis of Minecraft in a way, with players destroying cubes rather than creating things from them, and already distinct types of tappers are appearing. Neat freaks who like to make perfect squares and rectangles. Trolls who hunt out the neat freaks and destroy their nice straight edges. Artists who want to make 8-bit pictures on the layers, together with others who try to draw genitalia. People leaving messages in the pixels and still more just writing 'LOL' and 'I woz here.' How long will it be before we have the first Curiosity-based proposal? Or advertisers paying people to carve their logo into the cube? Will Veruca Salt's father stop his workforce shelling nuts and get them all chipping away to win the prize for his spoiled daughter? [Update: Thanks to Artie in the comments for sharing the Cube's Tumblr, On The Cube - careful though, some of them are NSFW]
In interviews prior to the game's release, Molyneux was talking about the power ups being in-app purchases, but that seems to have gone away for now, but I can't see how they'll stay away for good. As the user base grows, they'll need some way to cover their server and bandwidth costs. Maybe the scrolling info messages running across the faces of the cube - which have so far said things like "Congratulations President Obama" and "RIP Clive Dunn" - will become like promoted tweets in the future. And what about the cost of that prize, they have to cover that too. Speculation is of course running high all over the internet as to what it could be - with ideas ranging from a photo of a cat to a place in Molyneux's will, and from the often rumored Half-Life III to a RickRoll video. Molyneux says he's been working on it for years and it's definitely not something as ordinary as a big pile of cash or a fancy car. Only one other person on the planet knows what it is, and that person only knows because Molyneux needed help to implement it. The central idea was apparently inspired by the excellent Masquerade
Will people be curious enough to see it through to the end? My daughter was excited when she first saw it and loved bashing away at the cubes, carried along by the gentle, ambient soundtrack, and always leaving one cubelet in the middle of the screen for that satisfying 'screen cleared' moment, but she soon became bored of it and wanted to practice her math instead! Molyneux has said that it's up to the winner to decide whether they want to share what the prize is at the end, but will anyone care by the time we get there?
