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A few months later, they haven’t stopped. In fact, ten times that many people are now taking part in this “experiment.” Some are drawing crude pictures on the cube’s surface. Others are just trying to break the cube and get to its center. Still others are paying real money in an attempt to thwart them by adding layers back onto the cube. Today, its developer told Wired that just 50 layers of the cube now remain.
The end is near. But what happens when Curiosity ‘s cube is gone?
This enigmatic mobile game is the latest creation of Peter Molyneux, the bumptious designer of Populous, Black & White and Fable. The premise of the Curiosity cube challenge is that you must collaborate with millions of other players to chip away at the surface of a gigantic block in the cloud. Like a world-spanning game of musical chairs, the player who taps the final cube will become the only person to discover what awaits at the center.
Speaking to Wired via Skype, a fat cigarette jutting from his smiling lips, Molyneux swears that what awaits within will “change that person’s life forever.”
He refuses to elaborate.
Is the reward financial? Social? Philosophical? Molyneux remains reticent. “It is life-changing in any measurable way,” he says. “I’m telling you, you want this.”
Molyneux says that only two other people, both employees of his new game studio 22cans, actually know what’s inside the cube. He says he has not even told his wife and children. “I just could not burden them with the knowledge,” he says, sounding just like the Peter Molyneux the world knows — the grandiose designer with a tendency towards hyperbole.
Can the center of the cube be the thing that finally lives up to one of Molyneux’s incredible promises?
Of the 69 billion cubelets that composed the original Curiosity cube, less than half have been chipped away since the game’s launch early last November. Although the layers have progressively gotten smaller, it has begun taking longer and longer for Curiosity ‘s community of players to break through them.
“We’re on the cusp of it being forgotten about.” That’s why, with today’s update, Molyneux is cutting the experiment short. He doesn’t want the game to go on forever, so 22cans will drop a virtual bomb on the cube, blasting down to the last 50 layers. “I think six months is a long time for this to go on,” Molyneux says. “We’re on the cusp of it being forgotten about.”
There’s also the fact that 22cans is now attempting to raise awareness of its next game. Godus is the successfully Kickstarted spiritual successor to Molyneux’s beloved 1989 simulation game Populous.
That’s not to say that the experiment hasn’t been a success, at least in Molyneux’s eyes. In fact, he argues that the Curiosity cube has revealed, or at least reinforced, something fascinating about human nature: Even when given the most simplistic, unwieldy tools, people will use them to communicate with others.
By slowly tapping out lines of cubelets, Curiosity ‘s players have created complex works of art on the surface of the cube, even knowing full that their work would inevitably be wiped away in a matter of hours. In five separate instances, 22cans said, people have proposed marriage via the cube. Once, there was even an obituary.
In our Skype chat, Molyneux described to me a scene he once witnessed in which one person tapped away blocks to form an enormous picture of the World Trade Center towers. Another person came along and added planes, while another dotted in little bodies falling from the sides. Molyneux likens these to “cave paintings.”
Paying to Play
Since the launch of Curiosity in November, 22cans has added microtransactions. You can spend $0.99 to unlock temporary upgrades like a drawing tool. The “Statistics Plus” feature shows detailed information about the cube and its players, but must be re-purchased after it wears off 24 hours later.
If you don’t want to bother tapping away at the cube but have $10.99 to blow, 22cans also has you covered. You can pay to automatically remove half a million cubelets from the next layer of the cube. In a unique blending of capitalism and comedy, 22cans is also selling another in-app-purchase that adds half a million cubelets for the same price.
Molyneux says that Curiosity hasn’t become profitable, and has only generated a “few tens of thousands” of British pounds in revenue. He admits that the in-app purchases are silly: “It’s really just us being playful,” he says, laughing.
Although 22cans launched Curiosity as a totally free app, this “playful” monetization has apparently been the gameplan all along. Speaking to the New Scientist before Curiosity ‘s launch last year, Molyneux said that he planned to try to sell access to an extremely powerful “diamond chisel,” which would be 100,000 times as powerful as the basic chisel that players are given.
How much would this chisel cost? £50,000, or about 76,000 dollars.
“This is not a money-making exercise; it is a test about the psychology of monetization,” Molyneux said in that story. The plans to sell the diamond chisel for real money were eventually abandoned, although Molyneux says that no player has earned the amount of in-game currency that would have been required to purchase it.
It’s difficult to avoid drawing comparisons to Cow Clicker, the parody Facebook game devised by Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost that shone a spotlight on the way people will happily part with significant amounts of money in exchange for trivial virtual rewards, even when the game is transparent about sucking up their time and cash while offering them nothing in return but the plaintive moo of a cow and the satisfaction of having clicked a mouse button.
But unlike Bogost, who explicitly promised nothing and delivered it, Molyneux is telling players that a great, life-changing, unfathomable reward awaits them if they keep spending and clicking.
Should the reward prove to be another over-promise, under-deliver moment from Molyneux, well, nothing will really change: Curiosity will be just another commentary on the shallowness of being rewarded for playing a thin game.
What we should be worried about is what happens if the reward truly is incredible.
