Sponsored Feature: What Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube means for mobile game devs

Chris Swain is the creative director in the Game Design program at the New York Film Academy. He co-founded the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at USC, and has taken the lead on over 50 products, including games for Disney, Microsoft, Sony, MTV, and Activision.

It's been just over six months since Peter Molyneux's new development studio, 22Cans, released Curiosity - what's inside the cube? on Android and iOS devices.

According to reports, roughly 3 million people rushed in to find the answer to the titular question. Or at least they tried to.

Curiosity killed the server

Given the massive influx of intrigued gamers, Curiosity's servers toppled the second the app was released on iOS (and again when it surfaced on Android two weeks later).

Since then, however, such issues have been revolved, with dedicated cubenauts peeling around 270 layers of this 2,000ish-layered enigma back to date.

While countless people around the world are frantically clicking away as you read this, let's take a look at the cube from a different angle. Let's try and discover what it means for mobile developers, and where all this is heading.

One element of mobile gaming apps which Molyneux's latest romp has served to highlight is that developers can change their core dynamics over time with ease.

Yes, we know that DLC is usually available for most major console games, too, but these content updates rarely result in an overhaul of the base game's structure.

Not long after Curiosity's debut, Molyneux revealed that six big features were due to turn everything on its cuboid head and change the way people played the game.

This was no idle understatement.

It's been tricky to work out exactly how long it'll take until someone chips away that final cubelet and unravels the Curiosity mystery, but that hasn't stopped number-crunchers from trying.

With the announcement last week, though, that there are 'only' 50 levels to go, 22Cans predicts the final cube will be tapped away in a week or so. That's assuming the millionaires of the world don't mobilise to prolong the social experiment by adding cubes.

In fact, this "war of attrition" between the people paying to subtract and those now paying to add has led to outrage among those who have been chipping away since the social experiment started. On the other hand, mind, there are people who firmly believe this was a clever strategic move.

And there is a thing of beauty here. Asking players to pay money to purely just to troll everyone? That really might be a stroke of genius.

Centre of the universe

More importantly, though, what lies at the centre of the cube is just as intriguing as the insight it has given indie game designers.

For the most part, Molyneux has made a name for himself by taking massive risks, often in the face of extreme pessimism (or even just plain common sense sometimes).

Sure, he's put out a few stinkers in his time. More often than not, however, his innovative approach to crafting a gaming experience establishes brand-new conventions in the industry - so much so that top game design schools in New York and around the globe use his work as a cornerstone of their study material.

Hook me up

His latest output, in particular, has shown us that despite the apparent simplicity of a task - in this case, repeatedly tapping almost limitless squares - players react very strongly to a wide range of emotional hooks.

Although there is a (purportedly massive) reward at the end of the 'game', the payoff isn't really commensurate with the effort. Certainly not in the industry-standard sense.

Instead, the main driving forces are a sense of teamwork, the ability to express oneself with patterns, the degree of intrigue, and now the seemingly inherent desire to straight-up troll people (for no good reason).

Although the simple nature of the cube's concept was initially met with derision, its subsequent success has us waiting with bated breath. Not just for how this social experiment will end, but also for what 22Cans has up its sleeve going forward.

After all, the studio's name is a reference to the 22 planned tricks it has up its wizard-like sleeve (the Curiosity cube being only the first.)