Many years ago (1995, I think), we were brainstorming new game ideas at my office. Under the "no idea is a bad idea" principle, I came up with a suggestion of a massively multiplayer morphing artwork, where each person in the game would be in charge of the color of one pixel, and teams would compete to see who could draw certain images (a bicycle, a house, a face, etc.) the most rapidly. I sort of envisioned it like a cyberspace version of those big sports stadium events where a part of the audience would all hold up cards in sequence, to make a design.

Well, my idea was greeted with near universal derision: "Ha! That sounds totally boring, no one would ever play that," (so much for the spirit of positive-reinforcement brainstorming, heh).

Anyway, my arch-critic from back then recently sent to me this link, of a "pixelfest collaborative artwork". It's not quite the real-time dynamic team-based thing I had in mind, but it's close enough to make me smile. :)

Feel free to add your own pixel!

- Elonka

Update: To see an animation of the 7000-odd pixels that have been placed so far, check here: http://haub.net/pixelfest/ . I found it especially interesting to see how certain people tried to "grief" the image early on with four-letter words, but then the community responded by erasing words as soon as they started recognizing them. Some interesting dynamics there. :)

Experiments - Pixelfest collaborative artwork