RedditPlace versus PoieticGenerator
#pixelwar versus #pixellove
Several people have pointed out to me the new 2022 collective game experience called “Place” launched by the Reddit platform because of its apparent similarity to the Poetic Generator. I will show here that beyond appearances, they are not the same game at all. In my view, the two games and their underlying intentions are even diametrically opposed.
Let’s remember that Reddit is an American social platform financed by advertising and premium subscriptions. This site, the 19th most visited in the world and the 6th in the USA, holds the record for time spent by its users. In 2021, Reddit was valued at 10 billion dollars.
The Place game came into being in 2017. Billed by Reddit as a “social experiment,” it consists of allowing users to drop (place) a pixel of the color of their choice in a location they also choose in a 1000 x 1000 pixel matrix. Each user can only place a new pixel after waiting for 5 to 20 minutes. In the meantime, the pixel placed by one user may have been deleted by another. The experiments gather hundreds of thousands of users for several tens of hours. The result is an image composed of various patterns in competition with each other. This competition is explained by the rules of the game which make that the users have no chance to influence the image if they act alone. They have to coordinate in sub-forums (subreddit) dedicated to defend such or such region of the image to impose such or such pattern that they define among themselves. The size of the defensible region is directly related to the number of users who decide to get involved and coordinate in the corresponding subreddit.
The Poetic Generator is a collective game imagined in 1986 which started to work in 1987 on Minitel. There were then several versions adapted to various types of networks (including distributed networks without a central server) until today’s mobile version online since 2012 on http://poietic.net or http://poietic-generator.net. The rules of the game have remained unchanged since the beginning. Users each control a small pixel mosaic (arbitrarily 20 x 20) juxtaposed seamlessly with those of others. There may be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people in the image at the same time. Since users cannot delete other people’s drawings, they have to take them into account and adapt their personal patterns to the context according to their position in the global image. A “cybernetic loop” is thus produced between the local action of each user and the global state, which itself fluctuates according to the local actions. The result is an abstract or figurative image that emerges in an unpredictable way without resorting to other modes of coordination than the one occurring directly in the image.
The major difference between Reddit/Place and the Poetic Generator is that in the former case, individuals exist only if they participate in coalitions that are a kind of battalion determined to impose a certain pattern on a certain territory; in the latter, on the contrary, individuals retain a certain amount of free will and remain independent of the group and of pre-established patterns.
In sum, Reddit/Place is a metaphor for war, whose deleterious mechanisms and sad results are all too familiar, while the Poetic Generator is a metaphor for improvised conversation, dance and music, whose mechanisms remain mysterious and whose results are often unexpected.
It is not surprising that Reddit/Place is a game that operates on a centralized platform with proprietary software controlled by a commercial entity, whereas the Poetic Generator, at least in one version, is played on a distributed network that cannot be controlled by anyone, is published under the Free Art licence and its source code is open source and can be studied, improved, and implemented by anyone who wishes.
