The story of r/Place. As told by a foot soldier from r/Mexico (Part 1)
None of us knew what we were doing, which somehow didn’t stop us from achieving it anyway.
One morning of April…
It’s difficult to believe that it has been less than a day since The Great Pixel War at r/Place finally ended. And so I figured that I better put my story in writing before the events that transpired during those frenetic 72 hours fade into memory, and become the stuff of legends.
And legends were we. Each of us, placing pixel after pixel in the vast, empty 1000px per 1000px Canvas that greeted us one April 1st, 2017. In the beginning none of us knew what we were doing, and I would argue that we never figured it out, not even ‘till the end. But back then, in those early, sleepy hours, we found ourselves just scrolling around this new white world, confused and aimless in our tracks, as we discovered that we could place single color pixels wherever we desired. The only limitations we found were the very borders of the canvas, and a relentless clock that blocked you for 5 minutes after you laid a pixel down. Was that all?
Surely, we thought, such a vast, chaotic wild land would be impossible to tame. Surely, we reassured ourselves, this whole place would quickly degenerate into nothing but random noise and crumbling monuments, as people tried in vain to build from the ground up, only for their creations to be vandalized in an instant. And for a while, we were right in our suspicions.
And vandalism there was. For in the White Sprinkled Sea upon us, even the smallest islands of order popped to the eye like a sore. How did the Creators expected us to build anything in here? How could thousands of strangers from all over the world muster the will, the good-faith, and a precise enough coordination to draw something other than this colorful noise? And even if we could build a thing, how were we expected to defend it from bandits?
What image, what idol, what IDEA could possibly be worth the fight?
I’m sure other historians can tell you who was the first. Others much more knowledgeable than me who can pinpoint where exactly in the vast Canvas did the cursors of hundreds aimed themselves into a singular area, and willed order out of the chaos. But I’m not the one to tell.
Instead, what I saw as a bystander that April 1st was the emergence of life, color, and memes of all sizes and kinds growing almost by magic. And as the hours passed, as I laid a pixel here, waited, and laid another pixel there, the whole Canvas evolved and grew between each of my visits. It was an amazing sight to behold. An inspiring feat of human ingenuity, humor, and improvised politics in slow motion.
Yes, that’s right. For even in these early hours, even before the dedicated subreddits, the forums, Discord channels and massive bot armies of the later days, a silent, wordless body of politics was being established right before our eyes.
For you did not need any coordination to understand how a rainbow looked like. You did not need anyone to tell you how to Google the Helix’s sprites to know which pixels were right, and which were wrong. These characters, these pixelated idols were self-sustaining. Both by the love of their respective fandoms, the aid of bored strangers, or the actions of passerby's who simply knew, without any prompt or direction, how a Pokemon should look like. For these figures outlasted us all, enduring till the end of time. They were, without a doubt, our Titans.
At times, you felt less like a builder, and more like an archaeologist. Unearthing these Titans from the surface of the White Sprinkled Sea, where they had laid dormant for thousands of years prior to you. Waiting.
Then again, sometimes we unearthed Terrors from the deep.
One Color to rule them all
It began, as both great and tragic things do, as a humble idea. A stain of deep blue pixels on the lower right corner of the canvas. A blue place that grew slowly outwards.
Their premise was simple, yet powerful: Blue. Let us paint this whole place in blue. No coordination needed, no pixel grids or diagrams to follow. No dependency on a fandom, meme, or pop culture symbol that your builders had to recognize. Just place a blue pixel whenever you see a not-blue pixel, and keep on moving forward. Anyone can join, anyone can contribute. Comparisons with last year’s brouhaha with r/TheButton were unavoidable.
For this was not a group, this was not a project. This was a religion.
To say that there was a ‘battle’ against The BlueCorner is an oxymoron. Instead, it was more akin to the relief effort against a hurricane. A tsunami that flattened everything on it’s path. We were not defending ourselves against people anymore, but against a force of nature.
But then, as the fate of this whole Place seemed determined to be Blue, it suddenly… stopped.
I can’t say what happened exactly. In my view, perhaps it was the Titans who saved us all. For not even TheBlueCorner could take them down, nor wanted to. And their prescence within deep inside the Blue territory gave courage and hope for the barbarians to invade Rome later on. Or perhaps it was the RainbowRoad who gave us hope, as we saw it’s multicolored sword pierce the heartland of BlueLand and remain stuck there, unscratched, causing a wound which would never heal.
Perhaps the people of this Blue Nation got eventually remorseful at destroying so many artworks, and eventually found it much more rewarding to create, rather than destroy. It could also be that such a vast empire learned what Alexander The Great once found out. That the vastest of empires are the first to fragment into smaller pieces, and BlueCorner’s empire was the vastest of all…
Then again, perhaps their people got sick and tired of placing nothing but blue pixels.
I don’t know, and I’m not here to tell what happened. I only know what I saw, and that was that by the end of that First Day, the Blue Menace had subsided, never to be a threat again.
We really CAN do anything
What a glorious way to end that first day of April! The future was bright once again as people began rallying in the creation of bigger, and better projects. Monuments of all kinds were being erected all throughout the Canvas, building and building in a frantic, relentless pace none of us even thought possible that very morning. Soon, these improvised tribes were trying to one-up the other with ideas more and more ambitious than the last.
For activity on the Canvas had quickly evolved into a full-on spectator sport. Thanks to the 5 minute cool-down between each pixel you laid, you had time to go and explore the rest of the canvas to tourist around. For at this point we were all builders, but we were also an audience. And we all stood with jaws agape as our fellow builders willed their artworks into existence seemingly out of thin air. It was almost as if these were monoliths that were being slowly brought to the surface from inside the depths of the Sprinkle White Ocean.
Yet all was not fine. For terrors were still waiting beneath our screens, lurking beneath the now cosmopolitan Canvas. The Blue Menace may had subsided, brought down by its own weight, but it’s idea, it’s driving motion, it’s unicelular mind, had endured. Dormant in the minds and cursors of each, and everyone of us.
And next time, it wouldn’t be colored blue.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at this point in our tale, the biggest enemy amidst these construction projects of epic proportions was not some mindless, dark threat from the depths. Not yet anyways.
No. Our biggest threat, were each other.
For politics cannot be silent forever, and the wordless strength of the Titans could simply not shield everyone out there. For as the border of neighboring images touched, as the designs of clans and nations found themselves trespassing onto the place of others, the need for diplomacy inevitably arose. Forums were started, Discord channels were established, subreddits were taken as bases of operations. Ambassadors were designated, briefed, and sent to struck a deal with foreign powers. To talk, negotiate, to parley. Most of the time with good intentions in mind. Compromises, pacts of non-aggression, alliances, shared pixel designs. For arms were wide open for the welcoming of new friends and allies.
Yet other times, these ambassadors were not so kind.
