Curiosity will change the world? Testing the limits of a game world wide
For many of us games are synonymous with fun, addiction and learning. Before anything games are a business market, becoming more and more serious. To see how serious, I introduce Curiosity, a game with no limits.
Here is the challenge of the game : a cube, floating in the virtual is waiting for you to destroy it. If you manage to arrive at the center, your life will change. Let’s see what’s inside:
Wait. Is this serious?
We know how curiosity and games are able to help us make new discoveries, but how far is this going to go? Even if it turns out to be mockery or the greatest game ever, Peter Molyneux’s a facetious idea is genius.
Curiosity is not a game, it’s a playground for human research
As the author says here: « inside the cube really is an incredible, amazing, life-changing thing, and it’s taken me years and years and years to get the centre of the cube right. The power of our experiment lies in me not giving any clues at all about what it might be. » That sound to me like a very serious game.
The application developed by Peter Molyneux and 22Cans for android and iOS is testing the power of a game on a global scale. After reading some impressions about the game, I found out that most of people find it boring. Nevertheless, the fans of the cube image all sort of ways to have fun with this app. As far as I’m concerned, I can’t say if it really is so, because after 20 trials of launching the app this message keeps pissing me off:
It certainly makes you question
What is this ridiculously simple app, free and extremly inquisitive in numbers?
- 100,000,000 cubelets in the first layer
- today more then 200 000 players and still 99 million cubelets to go
- 1 coin reward for each block you tap
- 3 billion coins the cost of Diamond Chisel – the ultimate tool for massive intervention costs
I still try to find how much the development cost and whether they intend to make a real money exchange in the future.
Anyway, knowing that each of this layers hides something, you wanna chip to see it. Probably addictive, curious for sure, I feel this experiment it’s not made for looking on what’s in the centre of the cube?
A world-wide troll app about you and me and everyone else
From outside, curiosity looks like an experiment about connecting people.I personally take it as a piece of geek art and I think the cube might be revealing lots of answers about human participation, eagerness, understanding, creativity and people’s expectations.
If it works, this concept may change the way we collaborate today. If not, it is still an excellent research about games, apps and web culture.
You think I have too much expectations? Well, I can’t help myself asking… what if curiosity is a thing about the human nature and it can help us use it to change the world and solve problems?
To be curious or not be curious? This is the question!
Curious and willing to read more?
The Next Web – Curiosity: Why veteran game designer Peter Molyneux is going mobile with his new startup
Gizmodo – Bizarre Cube-Chipping Multiplayer Game Curiosity Now on iTunes
Techcrunch – With Curiosity, Peter Molyneux Explores Whether A Cube Can Capture The World’s Attention
Wired – Curiosity Killed the App?
Game Industry – Curiosity attracts 158,000 tappers on day one
Étiquettes : 22Cans, addiction, android, apps, collaboration, curiosity, digital art, experiment, fun, games, games industry, geek art, human, iOS, learning, next Steve Jobs, participation, Peter Molyneux, research, serendipity learning, serious games, understanding, web culture, what's inside the cube, world wide