Curiosity Killed the Cube

Blaine Arcade

How many clicks does it take to get to the center of a Molyneux game?

As you may have heard by now, Peter Molyneux’s experimental Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? has ended.  The past months saw millions of people chipping away at a layered cube until one lucky individual reached the core.  Molyneux promised a life-changing prize for that person.

Now just hearing Molyneux’s name should make you skeptical.  The man makes promises like Willy Wonka, but tends to deliver things that wind up being about as exciting as the bundle of socks you got for Christmas. Despite that, I found myself getting caught up in the experience and the sense of community anyway.  The curiosity really had taken hold.  Molyneux was smart enough to know that no matter how much he disappoints people, any cause for rampant speculation can reignite the fire of interest.

If I had slowed down for a minute and given my mining finger a chance to relax, perhaps I would have thought about the game long enough to realize that there was really only one possible prize.  A cash reward would have been too simple.  Molyneux no longer has some huge game company with vast resources behind him, so it was unlikely that anything super expensive would be involved.  That leaves one real possibility: involvement in the studio’s next game.

The winner of Curiosity will get to be a sort of god in their upcoming game Godus, which was successfully kickstarted a while back.  They will receive a portion of the profits from the game and make decisions that affect the world of the Populous-like mobile game.  Sitting in the big man’s throne is not a permanent option though, after about a year it will become possible for another player to usurp the cube king.

God tip 1456: Use the volcano to make your murders look like an accident!

So is this prize adequate?  I would say yes.  There are several ways it could qualify as ‘life-changing’.  The winner gets to make decisions affecting all the players for a long while, they will receive money for doing so, and this exposure could open some doors for him into the worlds of game design, or journalism.

I must admit, while I enjoyed the novel nature of Curiosity, something else about the prize bothers me very much.  When viewed in retrospect it now appears that the cube was less of an experimental game and more of a viral marketing technique for a mobile god game, something that does not remotely interest me.  Deity simulators have never done much for me per se: isn’t it better to be the hero on the ground risking life and limb against what appears to be insurmountable odds rather than a bored omnipotent kid shining a magnifying glass on the ants below?  This shadow of advertising that now sits over the experiment makes me feel a tad duped.  I didn’t want to be one of those people sucked into a company’s lame attempt to masquerade marketing as games.  Now I feel like someone who is proud to hold the national high score on Sneak King.

At least the games were the same quality as their food…

So while I think this experiment was interesting and the promised prize was adequate, I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth.  I spent hours picking away the paint on a billboard for a game I will never play.  Peter Molyneux seems to be on the way to success with his new studio, but I can’t say I’m interested in their future projects anymore.  Every day he sounds more like a man in a top hat shouting at you to buy a ticket to the freak show, and when you finally do and cross the curtain, there’s nothing there but a potato with googly eyes glued to it.

A Confessional Cube and 22Cans

Blaine Arcade

The geometric monster above me is supposed to be the start of something great.  I must step into this box and treat it as my confessional for a moment, to speak some hard truths.  This figure is the sole feature of a mobile game for iOS and Android devices called Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? It’s the first of twenty-two planned experiments from developer 22Cans, a pet project of Fable designer Peter Molyneux.

The goal of the game is to reach the center of the cube by tapping away all of the tiny cubelets that make up each layer.  At the center is a mysterious video link.  The catch?  Everyone is tapping away at the same cube, and only one person will receive the link at the center.  Molyneux has touted the cube’s prize as life-changing, but its not unheard of for the man to exaggerate.  So is this experiment a success? Confession:  Yes and No.

Where it succeeds is in its experimental nature.  There really never has been anything like this before.  Is it a video game?  An app?  A social experiment?  The cube is designed only to pull you into the act of mining away at it with your fellow touch screen tap-slaves.  Sometimes you feel like John Henry as you shatter your way through rows of cubes, and sometimes you feel like an archaeologist as you spot messages people have left scrawled in the cube’s current layer (ignore the angular genitalia).  These are great feelings that we don’t get from large game designers too much anymore.  The more successful a production company, the less willing it is to experiment.  In the end, that means less diversity and less fun for the gaming community at large (how do they expect to find untapped markets without tapping?!).

Sadly, and which I hate to admit, Curiosity’s failures are tied to the company’s small size. It’s sort of like trying to watch a little kid walk in a pair of daddy’s pants.  From day one, the game has been overwhelmed by its own popularity and technical issues.  Early on, many of the game’s Android users were plagued by server connection problems and bugs that erased many of the hard-earned coins used to buy the game’s items.  Even now, layers and some of the pictures on the layers refuse to load even after ten minutes of play.

It’s not all bad news, though.  22Cans does seem to be listening.  They’ve already removed a pesky Facebook button that tended to break combos when people tried to clear the screen and had to tap at a cubelet behind the button.  Now if only they could stop it from lagging you out of a combo!

Peter Molyneux has something of a reputation as an exaggerator.  I would say he’s more like the man in the top hat and the twisty mustache who says the most hideous mutant monster from the bowels of the underworld is behind a black curtain, if you dare to look.  Then it turns out to be a fetal pig in a jar or something.  22Cans has already teased their second experiment as a reinvention of the ‘god game’ for mobile devices and I have to say I’m not impressed — reinvention isn’t much of an experiment.

Nonetheless, I find myself hopping into the cube every day when I have a few minutes and hoping I’ll be the one to attain the prize and hold it aloft like some golden Aztec idol.  As an experiment, I’d say it succeeds.  Being free to download and play doesn’t hurt either…