When Curiosity Gets Competitive

Are You Curiouser? That's our lab where you can play against AI to craft more curious questions and probably the feature that gets people the most animated about Hypandra. It's fun! It's makes you think! People want to play it again. (They also want to argue with the judges. They want to be the judges themselves. They want to argue about whether curiosity can be measured. We're working on it!)

Regular players have told us that it makes them more curious. And they wanted to track their performance and compare scores. We knew this added gamification might get people coming back to play more and get them more engaged and that they—and we—could learn to be more curious. So we made the Curiouser Leaderboard.

We talked about the idea and planned it out, but it wasn't until I saw it go live that I felt something unexpected: frustration. Because, up until that moment, I was fairly certain I held the highest score in the game.

And then—of course—our CEO, founder, and ~chief~ only developer got the leaderboard ready for beta. His name appeared right above mine. Not by one or two points, either—a full six points ahead. Can't even call it an A-.

Instantly, I was thrown back into nostalgia. Back to the days when Daniel and I were classmates. Specifically, I recalled a public speaking class we took together in community college (shout out EVCC!) where we had the brilliant idea to take opposing sides on a debate assignment.

At the end of speeches, the professor looked at me, pointed, and said, "I agree with you... but he gave the better speech."

And yet, here we are again. Because, if there was ANYTHING I thought I did better than Daniel, it was tell a persuasive story.

Back to reality: All I wanted to do was get back on and play again to reclaim my title. Which was the whole reason we started the leaderboard project in the first place.

Success.

Today, if you have an account, you can add a username to show off just how much curiouser you are! Those wishing to remain anonymous can play without setting a name or making an account.

Checkout the live leaderboard below and don't forget to Play Curiouser!

How to set a leaderboard user name

If you have an account you will see a Settings button on the leaderboard page (shown below in red). You can click it or you can click here to jump right to the settings.