Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube is now open, contents still a mystery | Hacker News Reader

Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube is now open, contents still a mystery

engadget.com

55 pointsihuman24 comments

"You, the person who has reached the centre will be the god of all people who are playing Godus. [Molyneux's upcoming god game.] You will decide on the rules the game is played by. [...] Every time people spend money you will get a small piece of that pie."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU

Reminds me a little of 'ready player one' on a much smaller scale. I hope they think it was worth all that time tapping.

This was all a promo for Godus?

"A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!"

It's way more than I expected the reward to be. The winner gets a say when it comes to the rules of Godus and gets a cut of the profits.

Commercial? They are paying the winner, plus letting him/her be an intrinsic part of the game.

This is a lot more than I expected. I was thinking it'd be something trivial and self-promotional, like some autographed copies of Godus, or maybe a vintage Black & White t-shirt.

Also: according to the article, the winner asked 22Cans to make the video public. Otherwise, we would never have known what it was about.

It would be really funny if the person who won started playing only in the last hour and logged in to see what is all of that about.

That is exactly what happened

“People are going to hate me for this,” Henderson told Wired in a phone interview, “but I only registered for the game earlier this morning, about an hour before I won the thing.”

Awesome!

It's pretty much winning the lottery.

Well, some people wrote bots to do it for them.

More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_%E2%80%93_What%27s_In...

Apparently the winner is in the UK: https://twitter.com/pmolyneux/status/338677057481490432

Apparently they have said they will share the result:

https://twitter.com/pmolyneux/status/338686110966353920

A video of the result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771496

Contents no longer a mystery; are instead a setup for what is basically the gaming world's answer to reality TV. This could go either way.

This guy is a genius. He got 5mil people to tap incessantly on their screens with such a simple mechanic!

What the winner saw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhzb9OUWrXU

So the winner get's cash for people spending money on Godus and to decide stuff about the game....

Here's the winner on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bryanh559

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!

I initially thought that looked a bit like a lame attempt to get money while "provoking dialog about what makes game a game" or something arty farty like that, because he makes it sound like that.

Now it seems it's a rather clever attempt at crowd funding.

I am not sure why there is so much hate and vitriol against Peter Molynuex's ... uh, what did you say, "arty farty". On the comments for the Engadget article, there were lots and lots of incessant comments about his pretentiousness. People reacting with cringes. What is up with that? It's like listening to a bunch of middle school kids at an art museum.

well, because, sounding pretentious is a negative connotation.

pre·ten·tious /priˈtenCHəs/ Adjective Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.

I have no hate for PM, he is a cool guy. But sometimes he is needlessly pretentious.

That doesn't answer anything. I know what pretentious means.

What I don't understand is why people _don't_ think what Molyneux is doing is important, or have culture. Why do people _feel_ hatred and shame for him?

Feels like a kickstarted lottery, in a way. But since the winner didn't really know what the prize would be, the precise regulatory environment such a thing would operate in is pretty grey!

Well I just got unsold on Godus.

By the way, strange that's the winner is too in the UK...

There may be a good reason; the servers for the game ultimately decide what user tapped on the final cube. It's likely the servers were in the UK and thus latency would put US players at a disadvantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com