Metal Gear Solid’s (1998) GAME OVER screen has become a gaming icon; “It’s video game’s iconic scream.” wrote Zack Kotzer for Vice. The devastated exclamations of Solid Snake’s team echoing against a black screen overlaid with neon, futuristic lettering is proof of one thing: the player had failed, and Snake had died. Snake had died because the player failed. Considering failure and success as a life-or-death situation seems reductive, an equivocation entirely unrelatable to most people who pick up a game controller.

Introduction Narratives, game design, and interactive fiction are all topics I’ve been interested since picking up a controller over 10 years ago. Our task here was a perfect fit; to create a short narrative using Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (Twine, 2009). Bringing the idea of “surface effect” (Anable, 2018), that is, a user’s body having an effect over code with touch, we consider how platforms and data affect the users and how creating these pieces of digital art requires a deeper understanding of the code that makes it all possible.