Game App: Curiosity

This new App is the brain child of British game designer Peter Molyneux and is available from the apple and andriod stores free of charge. The game involves clicking on a myriad number of cublets that fall off to reveal the unknown number of successive layers of the cube and what lies beneath. The designer has promised that "something amazing" lies at its center and that "the whole world" must help in chipping them away. In the end only one person will be allowed to see a special message, who's context is yet unknown.

Having downloaded the app and played it shortly, I can vouch for the fact that clicking off the cublets is very satisfying. The app takes advantage of your natural curiosity to know what lies inside of a locked box. And, provides a direct outlet for your inner competitiveness to be the only person to learn the secret message.

I'm left curious what the purpose of this experiment is. Perhaps there is no center and everyone will be chipping away forever? Perhaps it is actually testing wide spread cooperation? Your guess is as good as mine, however for all of it's genius there is one big issue that many people seem to be running into.

I can hardly play this game for a solid minute before getting an "error connecting to server" message. And believe me, I've troubleshot this to best of my ability and it's not an issue on the user side. After some research I found a forum post from the Molyneux camp stating the following:

",so sorry for the 'error connecting to server' problem, we (and our server) are overwhelmed by the number of     curious people. Programmers have been on it since last night. We're surviving on coffee, sugar and looooong discussions right now."

While this game has the potential to be one of the most popular ever created, their ability to cope with high server traffic leaves me stunned. If I was able to play the game more I would probably give it a higher rating. However, their lack of capacity has caused continued frustrations for me and I have given up on the game for now. I may revisit it in the future but for now I'm putting it down until it's fixed. I would definitely suggest checking it out, but you may have to wait until it gains stability before you can enjoy it.