Take Your Pixel Art to the World Stage in Wplace

Remember r/place? It was a series of social experiments hosted by Reddit in 2017, 2022, and 2023, where, for a limited time, users could place one pixel every few minutes on a massive canvas shared by the entire internet.

As you might have expected, chaos ensued, with cults of redditors like the infamous Black Void trying to vandalize other's creations with thousands of black pixels. Nonetheless, each time, some really talented artists were able to come together and produce amazing works that, when viewed as a whole, are cluttered, yes, but cluttered in a way that perfectly encapsulates the charm of internet culture.

Well now it's back, albeit in a much more expanded format. It's known as wplace, the "w" standing for "world," as your canvas is a map of the world with 4 trillion squares. The game was created by Murilo Matsubara, a software developer from Brazil. It's been up since July 21st, but has just recently gone viral, leading to the servers crashing numerous times from the high influx of users eager to leave their mark on the map.

From user-formed alliances dedicated to exerting pixel-perfect control over their territory, to naive artists accidentally doxxing themsevles, and groups of racist trolls spamming hate art, it's been a wild few weeks, to say the least.

Of course, the big cities are completely off-the-rails, especially Washington, D.C., where players have run rampant with some not-so-flattering political portraits of J.D. Vance.

It also appears that J.K. Rowling's house has been bulldozed by transgender pride flags, as a response to the author's controversial views on transgender rights.

Though these popular locales obviously attract a lot of users, I was pleasantly surprised to see that even my tiny North Carolina hometown of ~1,000 was littered with Deltarune fanart! I salute you, random internet users, you've done me proud.

Unlike r/place, there seems to be no time limit until the canvas closes forever in wplace, meaning prospective pixel pioneers will have plenty of time to colonize their land with artwork. If you wanna join in on the madness, simply head to wplace.live and sign in for free with a Google account or Twitch account. Happy painting!