Why Are Half A Million People Poking This Giant Cube?

171 million pieces of this cube have been destroyed by players. Only 63.8 billion to go.
Image courtesy 22Cans

I spent Tuesday night bundled up on a couch, watching NBC’s coverage of the election with hot chocolate and a few close friends. One of them, Lee, casually picked up my iPad and launched a new app: a free game called Curiosity â€" What’s Inside the Cube? A splotchy block filled the iPad’s screen, and Lee pinched to zoom closer, revealing that the cube itself was composed of millions of much tinier cubes.

Lee tapped the screen, breaking a few of the blocks. Coins flew into the air, and immediately, for some reason, he was engaged.

He spent the next hour compulsively squashing hundreds of tiles, clearing screen after screen and racking up piles of coins, which can be used to buy more effective block-picking tools from an in-game store. There is no challenge provided by Curiosity, no way to fail. Yet Lee was delighted by the prospect of earning enough coins to buy a new pickaxe, which would allow him to dig up cubes even faster.

As the election results were winding down, Lee zoomed out and revealed the rest of the cube, which was now almost a completely different color than before. An entire layer of around 100 million blocks had been cleared by Lee and a few hundred thousand equally curious players.

In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity‘s creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That’s right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube.

Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable.

Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired

Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games.

In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be “such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired.” That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans.

Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar “experiments.”

Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn’t how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans’ servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it.

Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more coins. Some just carve messages and obscene drawings into the cube, knowing that given the sheer size of the canvas that it might be a while before another player finds them.

And some are just digging.

The studio says that the secret hidden beneath the final layer of Curiosity‘s cube is something momentous. “Whoever chips away at that last block will have their life changed forever,” a launch trailer for the game proclaims.

Could Curiosity be one big self-aware joke from the British game designer? Claiming that a hidden item in a videogame will alter the course of someone’s life is so obviously ridiculous that it’s hard not to suspect 22Cans must be playing at something.

Or perhaps like Cow Clicker, 22Cans means its experiment to be a biting satire of mindless games like FarmVille.

Curiosity does seem to be intentionally similar to many freemium games: There are coins to collect through somewhat meaningless play, those coins can be used to speed up the meaningless play, and that’s all there is to the game. It just doesn’t go to any lengths to hide it. It makes no pretense that players are doing anything other than mindless drudgery, and all but guarantees that they will get no reward at the end.

And yet, somehow, they keep clicking, clicking, clicking with no end in sight.

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