Disclaimer: The very nature of the r / place means that there may be nasty images, nude pixels and various other NSFWs included in the screenshots below. I did my best to cut and censor, but I recommend caution! For April 2017, the brains behind the Reddit community’s forum decided to invent something they called “r / place” – a huge blank canvas that allowed users to place a pixel each every five minutes. The experiment evolved rapidly from people placing random colors on different subreddits that came together to create logos, flags and other art. By the time the r / place canvas closed, a million people had taken part and passed on the Internet legend. The legend returned in 2022 for the r / place’s five-year anniversary, and unbeknownst to users, the canvas was designed to slowly quadruple in size over four days, allowing millions of pixels and new artwork to be placed. 12 hours r / Place in 12 seconds from position Well, listen – this is Reddit. Although the title is all hot and fuzzy, I’m not going to pretend that r / place is also not a clusterfart set. Between robots sabotaging the canvas with giant, hideous art and space-consuming flags, and colossal streamers motivating their fans to alter the works of others, there was utter chaos. Some of them are quite amusing: One of the jokes that runs is that Canadians just can not figure out how to design a maple leaf, as their emblematic flag has been turned into everything from a red drop to a banana, and the crew friend Among Us is hidden in every work of art, if you look closely enough – and there is a lot of nudity. It’s essentially Reddit’s own bathroom counter. But in all the chaos and memes, there is a moving history of communities coming together to represent countries, their hobbies and their favorite things. Unsurprisingly for a site that is terminally online, many of these common interests are video games, and among the flags, masterpieces, and references to things I do not understand, you can find them all. There are tiny pixels of Kirbies, Minecraft blocks, Pokémon, and even a Froggy Chair, all created and maintained by tiny, wild groups of people who have to watch their art, protecting it from “lamentations” – people who just want to destroy things. But it was great to see even smaller communities claim their space: Rain World has emerged as prominent as Downwell, Baba is You and Enter the Gungeon, and even older games like Earthbound and 999: Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors. The feeling I had in the early days of Twitch Plays Pokémon is gone after r / place: An intoxicating, nostalgic combination of “aw, that’s lovely” and “why though”, plus a dash of “who are these people with all this I had very little to contribute myself, so I was largely content to just help maintain the integrity of the existing tracks against the Scourge Of The Single Black Pixel, but it’s enough to make me feel like I’re part of it. of the thing as a whole. Like the Internet, there are trolls and holes that just want to see the world burn everywhere, but focusing on them – like focusing on the big picture of r / place – means we lose sight of the base efforts made in smaller communities. The fact that the Hollow Knight community and the Ori and Blind Forest communities have come together to create wonderful art is as moving as watching country flags declare a truce with tiny hearts between them. It’s not that r / place is not a grab. Pixel wars continue in controversial areas, such as the four corners of the canvas and the huge German flag that stretches almost all the way, but between all the clashes there is a quiet kind of peace. Honestly, having spent more than three decades of my life surfing the information freeway, I hope you understand why I am so cynical. The loudest and most common voices are the negative at best and the bigoted at worst, and Reddit is one of the most well-known places in both communities. But a colossal shared project like this helps me remember that most people, statistically, are not holes, and some of them are something even better: Creators. My boy Hat Mouse took his place! I do not think there are many things in this world that are better for society than the forces of collaboration and creation. Reddit is bad in many ways, but bringing people together is one of its strengths – and I’m glad to see people using this collaborative tool for good. If we could take advantage of this unity in some way, perhaps we could end the wars once and for all. Console wars, at least.
