Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?, the experimental app from Peter Molyneux and his indie studio 22cans, is coming to an end. The pass-the-parcel style virtual cube now has only 50 of its destructible layers remaining between players and the prize at the centre, which will only go to the single person who manages to tap away the final cubelet, and which Molyneux has repeatedly said will change the winner's life.
The original cube, which became available – after a delay – on November 6 2012, consisted of billions of these cubelets, and the dutiful tapping of hundreds of thousands of players has brought that number down drastically. But according to an interview with Wired, those hundreds of thousands of players have actually only tapped away fewer than half of the original total. After adding the ability to pay to remove (or add) cubelets, Molyneux has made the decision to use the latest update for the app to intervene and strip away several layers to bring the reward closer. If you load up the cube now, you'll see a big number “50” on each face with a countdown timer tracking how much of the layer players have destroyed.
Some might argue that Molyneux is distorting the purity of his experiment with this move, but he has his reasons, as he told Wired:
“I think six months is a long time for this to go on. We're on the cusp of it being forgotten about.”
Besides, Molyneux has a strong ownership over this experiment, and it's hard to imagine who might be able to step in and prevent him from “cheating” the cube like this. His research goal with the experiment was not to find out precisely how long it would take interested players to tap away that exact number of cubelets one by one, but – as far as I can tell – just to see what kinds of things would happen in this contrived situation. Apparently, he's seen five marriage proposals take place on the cube; the experiment has taught him that no matter how simple a tool, humans will use it to communicate.
