Nowhere Land, Game Development, 2025

Nowhereland is an interactive narrative set in a liminal, fog-drenched landscape echoing the ‘nowhere towns’ of England. The work investigates the aesthetic and psychological terrain in which contemporary far-right and conspiratorial ideologies emerge and take hold, where new masculine identities are whisked with paranoia, misinformation and manipulation. Drawing from ethnographic accounts, autoethnography, and media analysis, the work constructs a navigable, interactive landscape that parallels the liminal geographies of forgotten towns and our everyday lives.

 

Players navigate a world that offers no true escape, moving through new-build estates, empty gyms, and town centres haunted by unease. Along the way players encounter characters whose frustrations, desires, and fears leave them vulnerable to the pull of radicalisation, often mediated through the ubiquitous presence of conspiracy theories, misinformation and growing insecurities around identity. By placing the player in a world that mirrors both the bleakness of the environment and the claustrophobia of its narratives, Nowhereland invites reflection, careful empathy, while confronting the unsettling atmospheres in which belief takes root, and the devastating, dangerous consequences that can follow. The work offers the audience multiple entrance and exit points to a complex and amorphous situation, as the politics of the west becomes entwined with performativity, masculinity, conspiracy, nostalgia, misinformation, and fantasy. A place where ‘truth’ can be assembled, manipulated, reconstructed. 

 

Through its mechanics and atmosphere, its poetry, staging, and narrative, Nowhereland foregrounds how a digital society, a longing for fantasy and nostalgia, is mediating new political relationships and new identities. Producing both empathy and unease, understanding and new perspectives, the work offers a way of engaging with the research through multiple entrance and exit points, of assembling an individual reading, a unique experience. Positioned between critical theory, interactive narrative, and contemporary art practice, the project contributes to ongoing debates around the performativity of belief, masculinity in crisis, conspiracy, radicalisation, and politics.