Just what is the deal with Peter Molyneux's Curiosity? (UPDATED)

What is that black monolith pictured above?  That's just Curiosity.  A cube made of (according to the information included with the app) billions of smaller cubes.  You destroy the smaller cubes by tapping on them, and once an entire layer is cleared, on all sides, the next level becomes available for tapping destruction.

The hook is that, whoever destroys the final block at the center will receive a link to a video.  What that person does with the link is his or her own business, but creator Peter Molyneux promises that the contents of the video will be life-altering for whomever receives it.  Will it be life-altering for everyone who sees it?  The answer to that could give a clue about the nature of whatever is contained within the video.

Peter Molyneux has been responsible for other big stories in gaming, including the Fable series, which was supposed to be a revolution in RPG realism, and the now-infamous Milo demo for the Xbox Kinect, which Molyneux claimed we were not ready for as a gaming society and which many have speculated was pre-scripted.

Suffice to say, Molyneux is known to be a man long on ideas and short on execution.  That's why it should come as no surprise that his Curiosity - What's Inside The Box? has run into some technical snags since going live on Tuesday.  Many have had problems getting access to the server, and others (myself included) have lost part or all of their balance of coins after server hiccups.  He promises that his team is working on the problems and that the latency issues (sometimes you can be tapping right along and then discover that someone else has already cleared that entire area, rendering your efforts meaningless) and log-in problems should be eliminated sometime this week.  After that, he wants to bring out new modes of play (it seems they will be mandatory) that tweak the experiment and measure how we, the players, react.

However, independent of all the promises in the world (I was the 500,000-something-th player to download and play the game, so I regard my chances of being "The One" as very slim), it's an independently enjoyable experience.  The game (and it IS a game, regardless of what online naysayers may nay-say) has skill components, reward mechanisms, upgrades, cooperative play (if you want to think of it that way--like co-op with 500,000 other people) and offers a sense of achievement over time.  

So then, what is it about the game that interests people who know they have no chance of being the one winner?  For me, the game has two draws  One, I enjoy cleaning up the mess that others leave behind.  Undoubtedly, the quickest way to clear blocks is by zooming out the screen and tapping furiously, destroying the cubes at a much quicker rate in a manner similar to a shotgun.  However, that leaves pockets of blocks just hanging out on the surface, and they must be cleared before the next level can be unlocked.  So I come along and impose order from the chaotic scatter of remaining blocks.  Two, it's satisfying to look at something that's been designed to be impossible to complete, and know that we're going to take it down, anyway.  I'd like to see what the status of the cube is next month--assuming it hasn't been destroyed--after the publicity and novelty has faded, because with only hundreds, or even thousands, as Molyneux had originally anticipated, I do not believe it will ever be destroyed.  It's not an issue of ability or of interest, but rather one of morale.  Half of the time that I play only comes about because I want to log in and see what kind of progress has been made.  It would be a huge blow to morale if you logged in one morning and the cube looked exactly the same as it had before you went to bed.  People are the key to this experiment being a success.

So what do I think is inside the cube?  If I had to guess, it's going to be some kind of sobering truth, like "With all the tapping you did on this game, you could have powered New Zealand for three years, don't you feel bad about yourself?" or something.  But I'm okay with that.  For me, it's largely irrelevant what's inside the cube.  I would like to know, but more than anything, I just want to take the sucker down.

Curiosity - What's Inside The Box? is currently available for iOS and Android operating systems, and it's free.  Go download it and help us bring down this beast.

UPDATE: While I was playing last night, a screen popped up telling me to touch the 'facebook' icon, and that 22 Cans had just upgraded to 'super-servers'.  I'm a little skeptical about the 'facebook' button that I had to press, but apparently the server update did its job, and now that everybody can play at once, the cube is losing about a level a day (which should only get faster as the cube gets smaller).

Image above is taken from Apple App Store.  All rights belong to 22Cans Development Studio.