Healing

HEALING is not a real show but a participatory game, happening in summer 2021. For this to happen, the team of denialofservice.fail is transforming the Spitalseebunker in Schweinfurt into a wholly new world: a place full of screens and cameras, futuristic greenhouses, three-dimensional worlds online, but constant surveillance and an uncompromising social credit system as well. There is no audience, participants and professional performers will be contributing to the game simultaneously on equal terms. One iteration of HEALING takes approximately six hours.
Whoever gets hold of a ticket will be forwarded to a specifically developed online community-platform called NEXUS. There, participants will use a configurator to create their own player characters: What is their history? Their purposes and hopes, strengths and weaknesses?
During the game the newly-designed characters will be trying to improve their so-called lifescore (LIS). The lifescore determines the entire life in HEALING and depends upon how well your behavior is fitting in with this (fictional) alternative system.
It’s a life for likes. To get them different strategies are feasible: Attract attention and use the system for your own benefits, plot and scheme, discredit others. Everything goes, everything is possible – at least within the fiction. The participants must adhere to a clear set of rules of the game in order to make HEALING a safe and consensual experience for everybody. HEALING is all about your behavior in suchlike systems actually making a difference in the end: resistance or passive obedience?
Furthermore, by offering extensive workshops before and thorough post-processing after the game, the project allows for an intensive engagement with the entire subject matter: Which of the issues presented are already part of our reality? How far would we go recognized and accepted?

Healing can be played live on site in the bunker in Schweinfurt or online from anywhere in the world. A special feature of the concept is that online and offline merge into a joint game world.
The game is open to everyone and can be played by experienced gamers as well as beginners. Our team will be happy to help you with words and deeds to make your start easier.
The goal of the project is to create an unforgettable, aesthetic experience that, in the best case, also makes you think about the glass data sarcophagus in which we all largely already live.

Beyond that, we want to create a virtual space for art and culture in solidarity. Culture often takes place on the Internet without a critical examination of the complex and problematic side of digital promises.
We offer players the opportunity to actively engage with this topic.

For the last year, most cultural events where suspended or happened online without much general attention. We all need the return of great, communal moments. We all need emotional, moving cultural experiences to share, to to connect, to bring us together. We want to encounter each other and collectively create something amazing. HEALING will be a unique experience withing an exceptional setting exhibiting truly notable aesthetics. Come on, lets make memories together.
Now more than every.

For the players HEALING is not about winning, but about sharing an enthralling story. It is about oppression by a technocratic system, about resistance, secrets, love and solidarity, the blind worship of stars and first and foremost about the race for a good (enough) LIFESCORE.

Every single Cent goes directly to the game.
We strive to enable fair wages for all involved and to convert the bunker into a performance space that allows for an even more intense playing experience.
Thanks to the patrons and cooperation partners of our project we were already able to obtain the majority of the funds necessary. Nevertheless, in the course of the practical work we stumbled upon quite a few financial gaps, we would like to fill in with your support and help via crowdfunding.

For the game the community platform NEXUS is being developed, that is designated to serve as a data-secure basis for other artistic and cultural projects as well. Being open source, the software programmed for HEALING is free-to-use.