I have discovered an interesting corner of the internet

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our story begins with me seeing this very good tumblr post:

https://www.tumblr.com/scientistprophetgoddess/785398749359947776

after seeing this post and thinking it was extremely funny, i obviously wanted to know who wrote this and why it looked like this.

this question was answered for me very quickly by clicking through to the blog that posted it, wikicamp2.tumblr.com, which linked me straight to the source of the image, camp2.rectangle.zone. you can find the page for the world’s fastest cigarette here.

my eyeballs were then assaulted by an absurd litany of nonsense inscrutable to someone with such an advanced age as 27.

the wiki camp 2 describes itself as “The Wiki Camp 2 is an object camp -styled game where you do challenges by editing a wiki.” this was completely inscrutible to me, as it probably is to you. fortunately, the front page also includes instructions for this situation, inviting the confused to a page called “Explain,” which contains the following explanation:

The Wiki Camp 2 Wiki is a wiki hosted by Satomi that anyone can edit! Anything can be written about (as long as it abides by the wiki’s rules), whether true or false or non-informational.

An object camp is a sort of online gameshow, usually held over Discord or deviantArt, inspired by the web animation genre known as the object show. Object shows have casts that consist primarily of inanimate objects anthropomorphized by drawing a face and limbs onto them. They typically involve an elimination-based competition, ala Total Drama Island or Survivor, but this is not a requirement and modern examples of the genre have deviated from it more and more.

Object camps are a similar concept, with real people competing online, each with a character to represent them. The host of the contest creates a prompt that must be followed by the contestants, who typically respond by drawing/animating/writing how their character would complete the challenge. The entries are then ranked and the lowest-scoring contestants are put up for voting; you must avoid being voted out in order to win the camp, but for many camps the REAL goal is to make weird stuff and have fun doing it.

The Wiki Camp 2 is an object camp-styled game hosted by Satomi where competitors do challenges by editing pages on this wiki. You can see the challenges and entries that have been created for this camp on the sidebar, under “Camp Things”. See The Wiki Camp 2 for more information.

this was illuminating, but i was still confused. some googling, in particular the examination of several highly informative tvtropes pages, provided me with the following information:

in 2008, cartoon network aired a show called total drama island, which was a cartoon parody of survivor and similar shows. i remember this! i watched that show when it was airing at the age of 11. this is where my involvment ends. i have been vaguely aware that many people attached much more strongly onto total drama island than i did, but i had not yet witnessed the full extent of it.

in 2010, animators cary and michael huang created a youtube web series called battle for dream island to their channel, jacknjellify. this show’s premise was that a bunch of inanimate objects with faces competed in survivor style reality show challenges. i had absolutely never heard of or encountered this ever in my life. the first episode has 71 million views. the channel has almost 3 million subscribers. every new episode gets millions of views. oh yeah, this show is still being made. i watched the first episode and honestly? it is bad. i also watched the most recent episode and it is substantially more competently made and still pretty bad. i can imagine it being entertaining perhaps for very young children.

after this show came out, it spawned a huge number of imitators, i am genuinely in awe of the vastness of this extremely intense subculture i had never heard of until today.

something that happens basically whenever there’s a fictional work based around a kind of game show is that people wind up wanting to play these shows themselves, and so people invented object camps, which are community web games where people make up object characters and play as them in online challenges and make fun stuff.

the wiki camp 2, then, is an object camp, i.e. a survivor-style participatory gameshow, where all the challenges revolve around editing a wiki, because the person who runs it is a girl named satomi who seems to have a special interest in wikis.

i just…. i love this? again, being honest: i have no interest in the source material for this subculture. i absolutely do not understand the appeal of these object shows, probably because i didn’t watch them when i was 10. but i love that these things i don’t understand have inspired so many young people to make so much weird cool art that i don’t understand and that it’s gone so far that it’s resulted in something this deeply strange as a survivor-style gameshow based around people pretending to be inanimate objects editing a wiki.

the wiki has over 30,000 pages, and there is so much weird stuff. the admin enabled a plugin for mediawiki that lets pages use CSS, so it’s just a complete free for all of nonsense. here are some of my favorite pages:

but seriously, just hit the “random article” button and be awash in a sea of insane trash.

i feel an immense warmth towards the people participating in this project, and towards everyone in this little community of people who love object shows for reasons i can’t even come close to discerning. i love that there’s still weird little web animations being made in 2025. i’m glad that people younger than me are still finding new and exciting ways to be creative on the internet.