Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? is an experiment by Peter Molyneux's new studio 22Cans. Originally called "Curiosity", the game was later renamed to avoid confusion with the Mars rover.
Background
Curiosity is a multiplayer social experiment. The game setting is a featureless and minimalist white room in the middle of which floats a giant cube made of billions of smaller cubes ("cubelets") and white, floating text across each layer, usually topic related (hashtag, notifications etc.), with small messages. Players tap the cubelets to dig through the surface of each layer and reveal the next layer below. The goal is to reach the centre and to discover what is inside the cube. Each layer, which has a distinct look or design, contains a clue as to what is in the centre of the cube.[2] Each cubelet destroyed by a player awards them coins. Coins can be spent on tools that temporarily enhance the player's abilities, such as picks ranging from iron to steel to diamond that increase the number of cubelets destroyed with each tap, or firecrackers that can be laid on the cube in long strings to chain together explosions.[citation needed]
22Cans intends to add more gameplay mechanics as the players progress through the cube. Version 2 released on Dec. 7th has included 3 new features: Draw mode, Badgers and Golden Badgers as well as a page graphing various statistics about the cube against time. In addition, Peter Molyneux suggests there may be more to the game than it would seem: "There is something we haven't told everybody about when you play the cube. When you play the cube you're also doing something else. You don't realize you're doing it. [...] You're not just doing things in the cube. You don't realize it but you're doing something in something else as well at the same time." [2]
Peter Molyneux has said that "what is inside the cube is life-changingly amazing by any definition".[3] Critics have stated that the game designer might be over-promising. Wired wrote that "That its contents will have proven to be as world-altering as Molyneux promised." When it was suggested to him that he might want to temper his expectations, to tone down the enthusiasm, he responds that they’re looking at the wrong side of the equation. “I don’t want to believe less in something,” he says. “I want to make something that is worthy of the emotion behind it.”[3] Curiosity is actually one of the few games that can be successfully played by a simple robot.[4]
According to the new statistics pages available in game from version 2, as of 8th Dec the game currently has over 3 million users. 22Cans did not anticipate such widespread interest in the game, and were not prepared to handle the extreme load, causing connectivity issues to persist from launch day to nearly a week afterward.[5]
The floating text across the layers usually carry the hashtag for this 'game experiment', #Curiosity, or short, informal messages from the staff.
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