You don’t have to wait until Reddit’s yearly April Fool’s joke to place pixels on a canvas with an army of strangers anymore. Now there’s wplace, a new website where everyone is given a single pixel every 30 seconds. You can place that pixel anywhere on a world map, and everyone else can see it. Despite only being a couple of weeks old, the website has exploded in users who are all claiming territory with memes, references, and plenty of video game pixel art.
Big cities, as you can imagine, are a total war zone of artistic chaos. You can spend ages zooming in on individual portions of the map to get a better look at the lush pixel art, and much of it recreates iconic characters from your favorite games. You’ve got classic Mario sprites, Sonic the Hedgehog, and an overwhelming number of both Deltarune and Among Us present in nearly every metropolis in the world. It’s also fun to watch stuff that’s in progress and try to guess what’s being put together. Different communities are coordinating in their specific corners of the internet, which is how complex pixel art comes together. But there are definitely warring factions as well, with some using the opportunity to yell at things or people they dislike. Washington, D.C. for example, is full of… opinions.
There’s no shortage of names and logos, and the obligatory self-promotion basically everywhere, to the degree that wplace warns users that it does not endorse any type of cryptocurrency.
It’s also fun to scroll to the middle of nowhere and be surprised by what people are placing there. Here’s Dingus, Kentucky.
Unlike r/place, wplace has more robust functionality built in. You can press a button to have the website take you to a random place on the map where someone has completed a piece of art. Some of it will be impressive, and some of it will be the epitome of youtried.jpeg. You can also make an account on wplace, which the website uses to gamify the experience. There’s a leaderboard for regions, countries, and players.
Spoilers: The most active place in the world right now is Brazil, which takes up the entirety of the top 10 regions if you set it to “all time.” So far, Brazil has painted an incredible 530,210,191 pixels. You can also join alliances or form your own. The flip side of all of this functionality is that wplace also has microtransactions; you can purchase digital currency to unlock more features, like a profile picture or flags. But you don’t necessarily have to spend any money to enjoy what wplace has to offer, especially if all you want to do is admire everyone else’s handiwork.
