It’s over. Peter Molyneux and 22Cans’ great experiment came to an end at the weekend when a lad from Edinburgh tapped the last of billions of tiny cubes and revealed the secret at the heart of Curiosity. What did he win? Immortality, in a sense. 18-year-old Bryan Henderson will be remembered as the person who unlocked the Cube, but he’s also going to be the god of a virtual world in 22cans’ next game, Godus. He will take a cut of the game’s profits, and he’ll have a hand in its creation.
Predictably, this result has been as divisive as everything else about Curiosity. Molyneux promised something life-changing, and I agree with him that this prize, by any definition of the word, is life-changing. Perhaps inevitably, though, it left many of Curiosity’s 4 million players disappointed, and some of them angry. But Curiosity was about more than the result. Like any worthwhile experiment, the process was equally important.
Curiosity, in Molyneux’s words, asked whether it was possible to bring people together in order to do the simplest possible conceivable thing – tap at a cube on a screen – in order to solve a mystery. It relied heavily on a mixture of natural human inquisitiveness and Molyneux-driven hype. It was intended as a communication tool as well as a collaborative effort, a giant canvas upon which to tap out your ideas.
Give people a mystery, and they will come together to solve it.
It didn’t quite play out that way, but for the first week after Curiosity’s launch I was totally convinced. I remember standing in a crowd at a gig, tapping at cubelets to pass the time, when a curious guy standing behind me asked what I was doing. I explained that there was this giant cube floating in virtual space that thousands of people were trying to get inside, and that nobody knew what was in it. He was amazed by the concept, and immediately downloaded it himself and started tapping. It spread virally; he told his friends, and soon one of them was tapping too before the band came on. That, to me, was the perfect enactment of the beautiful idea behind Curiosity: give people a mystery, and they will come together to solve it. It’s human nature to want to know.
What I didn’t expect to be interesting was what people did with the surface of the cube. I almost certainly spend too much time on the Internet, but all I expected was a procession of doodled dicks and swears chiselled out in miniature bricks. We got a lot of that, but we also got some other stuff that was pretty amazing. It tailed off quickly, but at the height of Curiosity’s activity levels, watching the surface of the cube evolve was captivating. Vandalism was itself vandalised; people transformed swastikas and genitalia into drawings of bear faces and flowers. Pixel art flourished briefly before being chipped away. The On The Cube Tumblr has chronicled much of it for posterity.
Unfortunately 22cans severely underestimated the power of this idea, and Curiosity’s servers fell over little more than a week after launch, rendering the game totally unplayable and robbing people of their progress and their coins. Where the developer expected maybe 5,000 concurrent users, it ended up with 250,000 in the second week. It was a disaster, and a crushing blow to 22cans’ credibility.
By the time the servers came back up and the problems were fixed, I was bored of it. As soon as Curiosity was playable again, I’d lost interest along with many thousands of other players. It was the announcement that we were getting close to the centre of the cube that reignited it. When I came back to Curiosity, people were clearing the cubelets at such an aggressive pace that little messages and pictures were barely there before they were obliterated. It wasn't the same atmosphere at all. If you were there in Curiosity’s final hours, though, racing towards the end, you felt part of something extraordinary. As those last cubes disappeared it seemed almost impossible that it would end, and there was a kind of hollow shock when it did.
Despite Curiosity's technical disasters and several months of boredom, it got people talking, and got them wondering.
Again, we’re back to the prize. How you feel about what was at the centre of the cube will inevitably colour how you felt about the experiment as a whole. I have deep sympathy for long-term players upset that Curiosity was finally won by somebody who had only downloaded the app that morning and had never actually heard of Godus – but that speaks to the authenticity of the experiment, if you ask me. This was always a possibility. Meanwhile, a lot of people now see Curiosity as a giant marketing ploy for 22cans’ “real” game – if that’s what it was, though, you have to admit that it’s been a fascinating piece of promotion, and promotion in and of itself is not necessarily evil. An element of disappointment here is surely inevitable: after we’ve been given so much time to imagine what could have been inside, nothing could possibly live up to all of our expectations.
Despite Curiosity's technical disasters and several months of boredom, it got people talking, and got them wondering – really wondering. We tapped industriously right through 25 billion cubelets over 150 days because we wanted to know what was inside. It seeded an irresistible mystery and, in the end, I think it did manage to say something about human nature. Curiosity’s success, in the end, has little to do with the prize.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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