A new edition of Place is organized by Reddit, one year after the previous one. It could be the return match of the Pixel War which had opposed thousands of French Internet users to an American-Hispanic coalition.
Good news for those who had loved participating in “Place” on Reddit and following the fascinating developments of the “pixel war” which pitted French Internet users against the American and Spanish communities: it will not be necessary to wait another four years to attend the third session of the event. The new edition will take place on July 20, 2023.
Indeed, the platform has decided to relaunch its social game in 2023, a little over a year after the previous edition. Previously, it was in 2017 that the very first organization of Place (or r/Place in the jargon) took place. It was this first five-year interval between the first two sessions (2017 and 2022) that led people to believe that the next one would take place in 2027.
Place is a kind of social experience and community game that Reddit pilots and hosts for several days. On paper, the concept is easy to grasp: a blank space is left available to Internet users and anyone can have fun coloring a pixel (or tile). At the beginning, the pose is chaotic and then very quickly emerges a certain organization — a cooperation.
The installation of these pixels, which is subject to a certain delay (it is necessary to wait a few minutes before the same Internet user colors another pixel), has thus revealed a mess of drawings. Flags of course, since the event is intended to be global, but also memes, personalities, monuments or cultural or historical references.
Already in 2017, pitched battles between communities had emerged during the very first edition of Place. French Internet users who were there at the time probably still remember the invasion of the French flag by the one representing Germany. The battle was Homeric, and the resolution of the conflict altogether quite obvious — with a European flag.
But it was above all the 2022 session that made an impression, because the event went far beyond the borders of Reddit. The event mobilized, among others, figures of French and international streaming, which allowed both sides to mobilize vast communities of spectators.
Numerama had followed this astonishing virtual conflict in full, which mobilized streamers, Internet users and internet figures for hours. Twists, betrayals, mobilizations, on Discord or Twitter, live broadcasts on Twitch: although it sometimes looked like a rat race, it was a fun parenthesis from a certain social web.
The Pixel War, which was the nickname given to the 2022 edition, nevertheless resulted in a final fresco pleasant to watch. But it would probably be simplistic to summarize this game as just a pixel battle. After all, the pitched battle that pitted France against other nations only occupied a small piece of the whole canvas: elsewhere, on the large interactive white square, the sharing of space was done with relative good intelligence.
A new Pixel War… or a Reddit War?
Will the relaunch of Reddit Place also mean the return of the Pixel War, with a sort of return match between the Spanish streamers Ibai and Rubius on the one hand, with their supporters, against the stars of the French Twitch Game (such as Zerator , Kameto, and Squeezie) on the other? That remains to be seen: Reddit has been quite discreet about this edition, without announcing it publicly in advance.
Anyway, this new community session will perhaps bring a breath of fresh air to Reddit, which has been going through a serious controversy since June, due to price changes – and considered excessive – for access to the APIs. This allows external services to interface with Reddit’s servers, promoting the emergence of third-party applications, for example.
The crisis with the communities (the subreddits, thematic forums) initiated a strike, with entire areas of the site going private, various protest memes and various actions to mark the rejection vis-à-vis the politics of Reddit. The management has not given in: it remains on its line, raising rebellious moderators and communities in rupture.
According to our information, the relaunch of Place was desired for the month of June, but it was postponed precisely because of the unprecedented rupture between the website and its subreddits. Perhaps it has not been shifted enough: one wonders if the final fresco will not reflect precisely, not a Pixel War, but a Reddit War, with an irreconcilable divorce.
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