Back in March, luminary and icon Peter Molyneux announced his departure from Lionhead Studios, the company he had co-founded in 1997, as well as his exodus as creative lead at Microsoft Studios Europe. Molyneux said he had decided to move on to independent ventures, and had joined 22 Cans, an independent company formed by former Lionhead CTO Tim Rance.
Curiosity is billed as the first of 22 experiments from 22 Cans, part of a grand investigation into human behavior and the power of social media, and how designers might use this information to advance their game design. The data gathered from Curiosity, and the 21 games that follow, will inform the design of Molyneux’s next game.
In Curiosity players will be presented with a black cube in the middle of a white room. Tapping on the cube will zoom the camera in, showing that the cube is, in fact, made up of millions and millions of smaller cubes that all need to be chiseled away to unlock an object waiting inside. It’s not just you and your own cube, though. Everyone playing Curiosity will be working together, chipping away in tandem to find out what mysterious object lies within the communal cube. The catch? Only the person who makes the final, cube-shattering tap will be able to see its contents.
Who will be the one to finally shatter the cube? How will they choose to share this information with everyone? How will social media play a role in all this? These are the questions that the developers at 22 Cans are interested in answering, and in all honesty I’m faintly curious about how it will all turn out, as well.
It goes deeper than that, though. An in-game store will sell better chisels, which are 10 times the strength, for 59 pence (90 cents) each, allowing players the option to pay for an increased chance to be the one who breaks the cube. A one-off diamond chisel will also be available, which is 100,000 stronger than the default. The diamond chisel will cost a staggering £50,000 ($77,383.) Will any person or organization be willing to shell out that kind of money? Perhaps that’s all part of the experiment.
Curiosity will be released on mobile devices and PC, and is coming in just six weeks, according to Molyneux.
