Disclaimer, this is absolutely not a technical blogpost about scaling infrastructure. This is about social issues. Surprisingly, I am a very opinionated person.
I have been playing around with Wplace recently. And following an outage caused by accidentally DDOS-ing the OpenFreeMap servers, I felt like making a tweet over on Twitter about how scale probably hadn't been considered deeply and how the website likely wasn't expected to explode in popularity so fast. I like doing Kubernetes and infrastructure - even more so if it's for large scales, handling millions of requests.
Anyway, I got a reply from SM, linking the debrief from Zsolt Ero (creator of OFM). In it, he called WPlace a "digital graffiti for gamers", which seemed a tad bit condescending. Not saying that was his intent, of course! SM has a tendency to be cryptic. Though the "digital graffiti for gamers" part stuck for some reason.
I think (from the privileged position of being young) that a large part of the newer generations has a few major issues. Every so often, we may hear about the loneliness crisis which many young people seem to be affected by at much higher rates than the more "elder" generations (like > 35y). In many cases, this isolation issue is exacerbated by social media. Gamers also have a complicated relationship with the concept of socialising, with many interacting with friends solely through voice calls through Discord over a game played together.
But this isn't about loneliness or isolation. I mean, at the end of the day, on Wplace, you're placing pixels and are even more disconnected from other players, right?
Actually, what I meant to touch on is the creative aspect - building art of different scales across the backdrop of the world map. From my perspective, nowadays, people (particularly young people) lack opportunities to create - to make things. I still remember when Minecraft was a massive global phenomenon - it was an amazing outlet for people's creativity and they could build in the company of friends. Even up to today, I still play Minecraft occasionally with a few friends. But other than Minecraft, there aren't many opportunities to create and I think Wplace has become such a big thing all of a sudden because people have found a place to create again. And they're able to (surprisingly) link with people having the same interests as them to create art specific to their subculture or fandom.
So, I think it's pretty cool that Wplace has become a global graffiti wall.
