Sidekick is a story-driven video game for two. The gameplay unfolds through a digital poem that follows two characters: Laith, a captain of the national Palestinian football team, and his friend Iyad, who is invested in an RPG they play together in his apartment. In the tense, high-stakes days leading up to the biggest match of Laith’s career, a series of events forces them to confront their complex relationship.

The project explores dependency and the poetics of mediated communication through digital space. Two players inhabit the same game from different perspectives, with each participant seeing and controlling only part of what is happening. Progress depends on their ability to communicate and trust one another through these asymmetries.

Sidekick looks at how interactive systems can structure relationships; how rules and unequal forms of agency produce cooperation and vulnerability between participants.