Blue Sky Beginnings
A Girl in This World is what some would call a blue sky project. It was an idea adapted from a four-part television script that the studio had been holding. We decided to evolve the idea into a virtual world where women interact, weave stories, and shape it into a cohesive, collective, living narrative. As a studio, we saw it as both ambitious and defining. The project would bring together intersectional foundational technology that we are passionate about: blockchain, Gen AI and IoT. At both Screen Innovate Lab and studio, we celebrate blue-sky thinking; however, it has to translate into actionable outcomes. As we began developing the product, we realised it was two ideas in one.
When you kick off a business, the pressure is on to design, build and ship at pace. However, when you are starting up, there are a lot of other moving parts that have to align. Some of those parts are related to the way technology is being shaped and advanced alongside what you are making. Other parts are forming the team. Do you hire or choose collaborators based on a single idea, or the overarching direction and step through to what comes next? Our studio model is based on designing transmedia worlds. Some call it omni-entertainment, and others multimodal. Internally, we refer to it as designing never-ending stories, or alternate realities that exist all around us. Therefore, the team has to cross multiple creative formats, technical capabilities and design thinking styles. But we are not there yet. We are just starting.
Great mentors go a long way as sounding boards. There were several questions we contemplated in the ideation stage. Do we create a single-player narrative game to bring in the players before jettisoning them into an open world? A much easier ask and build, and one that aligned with female gamer stats. Female gamers are more open to playing single-player games due to online harassment in multiplayer worlds. The big question was whether this was part of our core vision, or simply an easy out to design, build and ship quickly.
We talk a lot about living stories at the studio and the lab. Living Stories are personal, testimonial and marginalised narratives rooted in the day-to-day experiences of groups traditionally excluded or under-represented in academic and political discourse. To achieve a global narrative, unheard voices must speak up and add to the collective. This process requires achieving Narrative Justice, defined as the inherent right of all people to shape the stories that define their identity, community and future. As humans, the narratives in our brain are fundamentally built on the social norms within our world, serving to continually organise and make a coherent sense of lived reality. It is a collective world environment within which individual consciousness roams free, encountering and shaping other consciousnesses. Hence, our idea of an open world environment in which females can weave stories into its fabric.
A slight segue here, even though the A Girl in This World project is fundamentally for females and those who are female identifying, the product model is also a test. A test that can be adapted for different groups, people and genders. The defining factor is to create a product that firmly displays our sense of the living story, as opposed to simply user-generated content. More about the difference between the two later.
Designing the product
When first adapting the idea from the television script, we weren’t looking at retelling the story, but more so interested in taking the core thematic concepts: empowerment, friendship, diversity, peppering a little Sci-Fi, and wrapping them into a virtual world concept with an entirely different environment to interact. It aligns perfectly with our internal focus on living stories as a way to create change. But what comes next?
Product design and filmmaking may look like completely different worlds, but they share a surprising number of core elements. In product design, you map out user flows and wireframes, and in linear filmmaking, you work with scripts and storyboards. At first glance, this might feel like an oversimplification, yet both disciplines revolve around the same central question, just asked from slightly different angles. Filmmakers consider what the audience is feeling in each moment, while product designers ask what the user needs in each moment. Both are structured creative processes that guide the audience or end user through an experience with clarity, intention and emotional impact.
But keeping the focus on the person experiencing the final work is often easier said than done. Hundreds of decisions are made along the way, with each new member of the creative team adding to the final work. Collaboration is one of the most compelling and satisfying reasons that we engage in the practice of creation. As we moved through the ideation and early conceptualisation of A Girl in This World, we realised the idea wasn’t enough without some understanding of what the community needed.
Audience research became our North Star
Research papers and theoretical scenarios that produce quantitative data are a great starting point. Listening to the people that the product serves is crucial.
We set out to reach our ideal audience, and sculpted a simple questionnaire that was shared across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and by word of mouth. LinkedIn provided us with a professional female audience, while Facebook allowed us to reach more mature audiences and their daughters.
The survey reached 55 participants. The questions were not related to the product, but focused on artificial intelligence and female stories. It is easy to get caught up in the AI gravy train when you are in the industry, watching Bloomberg Tech and listening to investor enthusiasm, so we framed the questions to get a sense of what the everyday person thought. We also included a question related to AI interaction with children. More to come on this, as this is a product idea our founder has had sitting on the roadmap pre-company incorporation. It may never make our three-year roadmap.
What we found out:
- When asked if there are enough female stories in the world told by women of all ages and diverse backgrounds, 98% thought there were NOT enough.
- When asked if they thought it was important to educate AI about the female identity in all its diversity, 95% agreed or strongly agreed.
- When asked if they would be comfortable telling an AI their story to incorporate into a story world that could retell it to future generations, 15% said yes, 52% said maybe, and the remainder were no.
- When asked what their greatest concern was around telling an AI their story, if any, 87% selected data and privacy, with the other answers reflecting uncertainty around AI or a lack of trust.
We will release the full survey findings in 2026, alongside other research.
Mapping Technology to User Needs
The research confirmed a few of our assumptions. There was a market for our world, but the mechanisms behind it required good governance, a dataless solution, and a space where our audience (females and those who identify as female) were firmly in control of their identity and psychometric information. Many times, we had discussed the use of decentralised technology for this solution, but had been confronted with responses that saw decentralised ecosystems as simply a tokenised system for financial gains.
So, the question: How can we create a world with strong trust and governance for its end users? How do you build a world in which others can thrive, feel respected, protected and safe?
What we decided to do:
- Build the creator tools for our audience, giving them control, while making it clear that we can confidently stand by the product and our dataless promise.
- Create identity and protection mechanisms that are decentralised, and implement those into the overarching system design (including the IP creation lifecycle).
- Evolve A Girl in This World into multiple projects, SheVerse and Project Tara, each responsible for a different layer of the solution.
After deep diving into what’s available as open source, we decided it was feasible. However, finding a team that shares these values becomes essential.
We are building the tools that women can trust, while auditing and shaping the foundation for a socially conscious alternate reality, in which algorithms and advertising are not our primary business model. An abstract vision statement, or a blue-sky mission statement?
The divergence and the experiment
The project now diverges with intent, and the lab is tasked with designing and executing the tools and systems. Meanwhile, the studio continues with the design, story, gameplay, and execution of the world itself. We are now in that energising middle zone where prototypes are forming, assumptions are being tested, and the unknowns are still louder than the knowns. This is the part of the journey where the roadmap expands and contracts in real time, where every experiment reveals a new direction and every challenge sharpens the mission.
Right now, we are validating and refining the toolchain that will eventually support the world. It is experimental because it has to be. We are building the runway at the same time the plane is accelerating, and the earth beneath our feet is moving constantly. The work requires a type of patient urgency. The world we set out to build is still in sight, but the path to get there has evolved. So, we are embracing that evolution as part of the story itself.
