MAY 2026
Most digital stories are designed to be experienced once.
Whether it's a film, a television series or many narrative-driven games, the experience follows a predetermined path. The audience watches—or plays—until the story reaches its conclusion.
Then it starts again.
For several years M-Squared has been exploring a different approach to digital storytelling through the Endeavour project. Rather than building stories with fixed beginnings, middles and ends, the project explores what happens when stories become persistent environments that continue evolving over time.
Instead of building a single narrative, what if we created a world where new episodes—or missions—could be introduced each week, familiar characters continued to develop, and every scenario unfolded differently because the participants themselves influenced the outcome?
The science-fiction setting is simply the first experimental environment. It provides a consistent world in which the concept can be explored, refined and tested, but the underlying approach is not tied to entertainment.
Others may simply choose to watch. Like live sport, every mission becomes a shared event, encouraging discussion, prediction and community participation because no two scenarios unfold in exactly the same way.
The same underlying approach has potential applications well beyond entertainment. Defence exercises, emergency response, industrial operations, healthcare training and education all rely on people repeatedly engaging with evolving scenarios rather than fixed sequences of events. Persistent, simulation-driven environments offer a way to explore those scenarios collaboratively while allowing each exercise to unfold differently based on the decisions participants make.
I'm less interested in whether Endeavour becomes the future of entertainment than in what it teaches us about participation.
As emerging technologies continue to blur the boundaries between physical and digital experiences, I suspect persistent, simulation-driven environments will become an increasingly important way for organisations to engage, educate and collaborate.
Today, that exploration happens to take place aboard a fictional starship. Tomorrow, it may just as easily take place in a hospital, a factory, an emergency operations centre—or somewhere we haven't imagined yet.