CURIOSITY: What’S Inside the Cube?
CURIOSITY: What’s Inside the Cube? Matt Siegle Let’s not call it a game. Version 1.0 launched at the end of Oc- Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? is tober 2012. The initial flood of tappers a self-proclaimed “one-of-a-kind social crashed the 22Cans servers. The Curiosi- experiment.”1 This iOS and Android ty in-app “stats” section shows this usage app is masterminded by software studio declining quickly, however, and, perhaps 22Cans, and Peter Molyneux—famous in response, the cube’s surface imagery among gamers for designing Populous started to change. Mystical CGI graph- (1989), the first PC god game. Opening ics shifted to architectural travel photo- Curiosity, a player is presented with a graphs. A month later, the cube began to three-dimensional cube, skinned with pic- feature snapshots of faces, four per side, tures, floating and slowly spinning in a layer after layer. A quick Google search glowing, white room. Pinch-zoom half a suggests that these snapshots are most dozen times and the surface dissolves into likely crowd-sourced5 from those who itty-bitty “cubelets,” exploding seem- funded 22Cans’ Kickstarter campaign ingly at random. If you happen to touch for their forthcoming “delightful rein- one, it shatters, and you receive one coin. vention of the god game”6 called Project Players join “thousands of people world- GODUS. As of this writing there are nine wide to simultaneously chip away [in faces per side—tiled underneath a giant real time]…”—a massively-multiplayer countdown number. tapping experience.2 “Deep in the centre [sic] of the cube is something life-chang- For the uninitiated: god games are a ingly amazing,” claims 22Cans, “but type of AI simulation where the player only the first person to reach the centre is an unseen divinity with modest influ- will discover what’s inside.”3 To get ence over a digital world of worshipers.
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