Projects

No Place Like
IA4: Dreams & Echoes
Haunted Wires
Mycomythopoeia
In Search of the Strange
Parsing Memory
Distant Librarians
The Pengguling Egg
Residue
World of Keepers
Time Odyssey
Beachcomber
Spook_bot
Macabre Mail
Museum of Imagined Futures
this place [of mine]

No Place Like…

No Place Like is an interactive digital artwork (part interactive fiction, part micro game) that I created for the Imperial War Museum’s Young Producer programme – a talent development programme for young people interested in producing and curating.

I was selected for commission by one of the Young Producers (Mac), who set me a brief to create an interactive, ‘gamified’ response to several oral history recordings from the museum’s archive. Each recording includes testimony from an adult recounting their childhood experiences of war and migration.

The work began as a collaboration, as Mac shared her own experiences, hopes and aspirations for the piece. Based on our conversations, we agreed on a chapterised, interactive narrative work, plotting a journey of displacement through a child’s perspective. I then wrote, illustrated and built the artwork in Twine.

Sensitivity, story and mechanics

In developing the work, I was acutely aware that any response to archive stories of lived experience of war, conflict and displacement would need to treat these stories with absolute sensitivity. Through discussion with Mac and Jacquie (Imperial War Museum North), we agreed on an abstract tale, exploring universal themes and experiences rather than a direct interpretation of one person’s lived experience. To this end, the work explores themes like home, displacement and loss through a semi-fantastical lens, using magic realism and folkloric motifs to present a ‘child’s-eye’ perspective on such themes.

Similarly, while the artwork does include interactive game mechanics to create a sense of pressure, conflict and stakes – I specifically chose to shape these mechanics around the types of real-life decisions, pressures and difficult choices people may face when experiencing displacement. While you cannot ‘win’ the game, there are two distinct endings and varied routes through the story. These are governed by your decisions (however small they seem), where each action dictates what pieces of the story you will see, as well as impacting your resilience ‘score’ or sense of connection to home (shown in terms of how ‘powerful’ the Hearth Destroyer does or does not become). As such, every choice you make when ‘playing’ the artwork shapes your journey through the story and, ultimately, where you arrive at the end of the tale.

Exhibition

I exhibited the work at the Imperial War Museum North, at Salford Quays in Autumn 2025 alongside several other artworks commissioned by different Young Producer Groups (including paining, illustration, protest art and VR).

The piece was displayed on a laptop in a lo-fi set designed by Mac to mimic the feel of a child’s bedroom, complete with childhood artefacts from the museum’s collection. Mac also constructed a paper house to lead players to a password that initiates the story, creating a sense of connection and physical/digital immersion. A larger screen attached to the laptop allowed other audience members to follow along with the story as one person navigated the piece. Chapter breaks allowed ‘players’ to leave or swap over during the experience, though any decisions made in previous chapters still carried forward to impact the rest of the narrative.

Next steps

I’m currently working on some technical revisions to the piece, with the intention of making it playable on more browsers and devices. I would also love to explore expanding the artwork (or creating a suite of interlinked works) within a further developed physical set piece.

Credits

Created, written, illustrated and built by: Me (Michelle Collier)
Produced by: Mckinley “Mac” Howard
With support from: Jacqueline Reich and Stephen Dexter
Commissioned by: Imperial War Museums

No Place Like… was inspired by oral histories on display in IWM, that tell stories of displacement, evacuation and forced migration due to conflict, experienced by people around the world and across time.