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Peter Molyneux’s 22Cans studio will release its first game, Curiosity, in the coming weeks, designed to explore how social media is used to spread information.
The game/experiment puts players into a virtual room containing a single black cube which players can hit causing it to fracture and break apart. Fractures caused by other players also show up.
The cube will eventually open up, revealing its innards only to the person who made the final blow. Molynuex promises that what’s inside will be “truly amazing,” with the purpose of the app being to track how news of the block’s content spreads over social media.
“We will rely entirely on social media,” Molyneux told New Scientist. “How will this person prove it? That in itself becomes a fascinating aspect of this experiment.”
The results will be used in the development of a new game set for release in a few years time.
To make things even more interesting a second phase of the Curiosity experiment will launch before the cube opens, giving players the option to buy high powered chisels to increase their chance of breaking into the black box.
An iron chisel will cost 59p, offering ten times the power of regular tapping, whilst a one off diamond chisel, providing 100,000 times the power, will be sold for £50,000.
“It’s an insane amount of money,” says Molyneux. “This is not a money-making exercise; it is a test about the psychology of monetisation.”
Curiosity will be available on PC and mobile devices.
