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. there, the world must tap through thou- When the followers prosper, the player sands of layers, each made of millions gains more powers—and so the game of cubelets, and each distinguished by a progresses. Importantly, the player is not distinct color or picture scheme.4 There striving to reach the end of a path, but is some variation in gameplay—accurate rather works to shape a world—a com- tapping multiplies coin values; coins munity, even—through an open-ended may be used to buy chisels and bombs series of manipulations. Hm. Sounds like for enhanced demolition; you can draw the Cube. Unwitting worshippers tap pictures. Molyneux also hopes players away on their iPads and Samsung Galaxy will be “curious” enough to unlock new phones, while visual “clues” and new features unveiled during the course of the game features are revealed willy-nilly— game, even paying real money through to keep us curious. Rather than allowing iTunes/Google Play for special abilities. these powers to emerge within gameplay But the core mechanism is constant: tap- itself, the programmers of 22Cans as- ping cubelets. sume the deity role, transforming Curios- ity into an undeclared god game through Siegle on Molyneux
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their manipulation of the user community. community, shaded by discourse, is vastly Meanwhile, the seemingly endless Cube more satisfying than the strict restraints of has become a successful launch pad for the game’s architecture, and here, in the Project GODUS. 22Cans’ carrot-dangling Curiosity experiment at large, is where veers more toward funding stunt than Molyneux somewhat unintentionally suc- experiment, forestalling the potential out- ceeds. comes of such a massive (though decen- tralized) collaborative effort. So much chatter over this highly aesthetic virtual object—we’re reminded of Claire Well, players may be getting fleeced, but Bishop’s recent admonishment of much I’m still tapping. Curiosity is a slick and contemporary art for turning a blind eye somewhat new-agey take on the satis- to the technological advances fundamen- factions of popping bubble-wrap. Mo- tally shifting communication, media, lyneux’s quest for meaningful gaming and social relations.8 Bishop goes on to channels simultaneous connectivity into explain that adherence to physicality and some kind of digital utopian workplace, intellectual property will doom art to evoking a breezy sense of accomplish- nostalgic farce. Her description of the few ment. Meanwhile, as all the world gathers art works that do successfully incorporate ‘round the collective digital abstraction, Web 2.0+ is an awfully good description the Cube anchors a real-time community, of Curiosity: “Each suggests the endlessly sibling to Second Life or the Twitter- disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera verse—but with a crucial difference: while of the virtual age and its impact on our the vanity space of social media can reflect consumption of relationships, images, and worldly classifications through language, communication; each articulates some- appearance and politics, each user of the thing of the troubling oscillation between cube is the exact same anonymous, tap- intimacy and distance that characterizes ping finger. Indeed, perhaps it’s more com- our new technological regime.” Though munist than utopian—or more capitalist: Curiosity isn’t art per se, Molyneux comes an MMP sweatshop. In any case, the ul- yet one step closer to the truly contempo- terior world looks pretty dark and boring rary work: absorbing lessons of the hastily in comparison. Isolated and jabbing at the advancing virtual era, but largely to pro- screen, the idealistic benefits of Web 2.0+ motional and narcissistic ends. Whatever are channeled into the rote pleasures of its designers’ intentions, Curiosity’s am- endless zoom, scroll, and tap. bivalent embrace of digital “community” draws out and exemplifies the darkness Indeed, despite the dull reality of Curios- at the center of social media—the Web, ity’s mechanics, the Internet is full of talk Cubed. about all things Cube—from speculation over just how many cubelets make up the total volume to YouTube videos demon- strating the Diamond Chisel (available for three billion coins). One lyrical blog- ger went so far as to imagine the Cube suspended by space tethers or anti-gravity near a Swiss lake.7 This quirky nodal Siegle on Molyneux
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Notes:
1 Description of Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? on the Apple App Store. Accessed April 9, 2013. The Cube has since been opened, and the app is no longer available for download. 2 In actuality, much of this “simultaneity” appears to be approximated by anima- tions—no doubt owing to the technical challenges of syncing millions of cubelets across thousands of connected devices. 3 Description of Curiosity – What’s Inside the Cube? 4 Internet rumors suggest that these pictorial schemes hint at the Cube’s secret. 5 Harry Slater. “The Curiosity Cube Diaries - Volume II.” Pocket Gamer, April 3, 2013.