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Redditors have been sweating away, placing single-pixel dots on a blank canvas for the last five days. The game was hosted by r/Place, a community on Reddit created by Josh Wardle. Yes, the creator of the viral word game Wordle.
The goal of the participants is to draw an image and maybe preserve it till the end. Thousands of people come together to fill the massive canvas before it starts to disappear, leaving behind an empty white space.
Redditors were first introduced to the r/Place in 2017
The game originated from the subreddit r/Place as an April Fools’ Day experiment in 2017. The project was simple but massive. Users were allowed to place a single-pixel dot on a blank canvas but with a time gap of 5 minutes.
Due to time constraints, artists need to band together to create artworks of a decent size. The project was a massive success lasting for 72 hours, with close to 16 million dots placed on the digital canvas.
Five years later, the group decided to repeat the experiment in 2022, launching it on April Fool's Day. The project ended up becoming even bigger this year, with over 4x dots placed compared to the last time.
Over 6 million users placed around 72 million dots from April 1 to April 5, which means more than 2.5 million dots were placed on the canvas every hour.
The main aim of the event was to bring together many genres of art and internet sub-culture together on one canvas as a fun event.
The idea is very similar and is rumored to be inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage project. The 2005 project was created by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old entrepreneur who needed to raise money for his college education. Tew planned to sell 1 million pixels of internet ad space for $1 each. The project was a success and can be viewed here.
But unlike the Million Dollar Homepage, r/Place keeps evolving as people keep drawing additional dots every 5 minutes. It is also free.
Art that dominated the r/Place
The canvas got two expansions, one on day 2 and the other on day 3. As the game began, a massive Ukrainian flag and a large marijuana leaf started to show up on the canvas.
The board was covered with flags from all around the world, with LGBTQ+ flags joining them. The trans community of Reddit placed a massive trans flag on the canvas.
Fans of various franchises spent time creating different posters. A Star Wars and a One Piece poster adorned the center of the canvas. A black blob called the "void" also appeared on the canvas twice but didn't last long.
After the first expansion, a purple fog hovered around the canvas for some time before disappearing.
A massive German flag was drawn across the canvas after the third expansion. Many communities kept defending their art until the last day, for example, the aforementioned Star Wars poster was able to survive all five days, along with a cartoon penguin drawing on the left edge and many other posters.
Towards the end, players could only place white dots on the canvas, erasing the grand masterpiece and returning it to a blank canvas.
