2026-05-22 –, Lichtung Language: English
WEKILL//LEAKS is a 2-player card game of Courageous Publishing and Imperialist Sh!tf#ckery.
It is an experiment in political story-telling and historicisation of a deep and dense story: the story of WikiLeaks and its persecution by the Empire.
It engages players into projecting themselves in the shoes of the courageous journalists, hackers and publishers who were part of that story.
We will actively collect feedback through this session in order for the game to evolve towards its "v1.0".
2+ years in the making, with an iterative design to improve it according to the feedback of playtesters, the game is reaching a "final" version 1.0.
It found its origin during the long persecution of Julian Assange, while he was detained isolated in a British dungeon for his work as a journalist and a publisher.
Now that he has been released (by the fruit of a massive decentralized campaign and by pleading guilty to doing journalism, a major blowback for courageous journalists worldwide...), the game aims at telling the story of WikiLeaks and its persecution and its numerous, complex aspects.
We chose a card game as the medium because of its engaging and simple nature, that allows to "shuffle" the story itself to read it by many different angles, and to use it as a substitute for the numerous books, articles and documentaries one should consult to keep up with the multiple aspects of this complex story.
We also use the multiplicity of the cards (2 decks of 40 cards for each player, for a total of 80) to bring a broad focus on a wide range of aspects of the story, rather than focus on a few (which any article is forced to do.). This includes various topics involved in the building a resilient, censorship-resistant publishing organisation, as well as questions related to counter-surveillance and repression.
We hope that through its tongue-in-cheek yet crude view on the practices of the Empire, the game can serve as "inoculation" against manipulation of public opinion.
We also hope that its 100% self-published, experimental, artistic and hopefully fun nature have a network-forming action: to bring people together through playtests and game sessions, to mobilize them and make them ready to act together.
More information about the game: https://dissent-and-datalove.institute/artworks/wkl/
This workshop is intended as a hybrid: part presentation of the game, part answering questions about it, and part playtest, where participant can start hands-on playing and maybe learning about its story itself.
Discussion will focus on what games bring to us in terms of emotions and potential for imagination, invention and creation of time+spaces together.
The Institute for Dissent and Datalove is a loose collective comprised of hackers, artists, activists and tinkerers. It overlaps with networks of solidarities involved in active defense of free speech and free/libre technologies, technology critics and political interventions.
The Institute for Dissent and Datalove has so far mostly been used for operations of de/re-contextualization of large datasets, de-formatting of formats and playful use of liberating algorithms.
It tries to criticize and deconstruct itself, while remaining grounded in uncompromising collective practices of autonomy and solidarity.
Through playful and political anonymity, every project of the Institute can become its own ad-hoc network, its own community, its own "invisible committee"...