Reddit’s massive collaborative art project, r/place, was a fascinating moment and experiment in internet history; it allowed Redditors to change a single pixel from a 16-color palette every five minutes, and it was a fascinating moment and experiment in internet history (I, myself, have haphazardly decided to place a single pixel to clean up an errant pixel placed on a dedicated pixel painting to Berserk creator, Kentaro Miura). The mural was open for four days to any Redditor to edit before being closed on April 4 this month, resulting in a fantastic collection of micro-images that will be discussed and examined for years to come.
There’s a little game you can play to get a closer look at the finer details in these images without straining your eyes too much. This game is r/placeguesser, which is a free itch.io game. r/place guesser is a hidden object game that takes a small snapshot of the massive r/place canvas, gives you a few seconds to contemplate and memorize its intricacies, and then asks you to find and pin a flag onto the giant canvas. You have five rounds to complete, and the faster and more accurate you are, the more points you will earn.
If you’re a masochist, you can also change the “zoom level” of the snapshot you’re given, which can result in you being given a smaller portion of the image to identify later. This is obviously more difficult, but it also gives you more points, and a high score can be used for bragging rights and later shared in the comments section. You can also play the game in hardcore mode if you’re a true blue, hardcore masochist who has memorized every single detail on the canvas. After showing you the snapshot, this turns the entire canvas grey, allowing you to pin the location while blindfolded.
Given how compact and cluttered the r/place canvas is, this is an excellent idea for a hidden object game, though some of the mural’s more eye-catching memes may make the game slightly easier. One of my rounds featured a snapshot taken right in the middle of TotalBiscuit’s iconic “LUL” twitch emote, which is prominently displayed in the center of the canvas.
The fact that this iteration of r/place—the first was in 2017—is larger than the first means that there are more spaces for communities to insert images, memes, and random anime girls into tiny nooks and crannies on the canvas, and thus more things to keep an eye out for. If your photo is one of these, you’re in luck.
At the same time, the 2017 version of the canvas is available in r/place guesser for your object hunting needs. Because there are fewer details to look for, the search becomes a little easier.
Right now, you can play r/place guesser. If you can’t get enough of r/place, there’s another place where you can dig deeper into the recent canvas: Minecraft, thanks to another Redditor’s efforts.
