"That's the beauty of the LLM: infinite playability"
Fai Nur talks about Status, an AI-simulated social media game where players become famous in their own worlds.
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last update, because we were preparing for the Dubai GameExpo Summit. You’ll hear more about the AI part of that in future editions. But for now, here’s this week’s AI Gamechangers, where we meet Fai Nur.
Fai’s simulated social media game Status exploded from 6,000 beta users to over a million in just one month. Powered by large language models and crafted for a Gen Z audience raised on TikTok, Status encourages you to role-play as celebrities in a richly reactive feed. Fai shares how her team built an app with runaway engagement, how InWorld helped them bring costs down while levelling up realism, and why teenage girls might ditch real social media for this safer, more playful alternative.
If you're new here, welcome! AI Gamechangers is your guide to practical innovation in the games industry, quizzing creators who are building with generative AI. Our archive is packed with smart, surprising interviews, and it’s free to browse and share. Got something to shout about? Hit us up on Substack or by email.
Fai Nur, Wishroll
Meet Fai Nur, co-founder and CEO of Wishroll, creators of Status. It’s an AI-simulated social media game that draws inspiration not only from Twitter in style but from The Sims and Roblox in sentiment. It’s taken its intended teen audience by storm.
With a background at tech giants Facebook and Snapchat, before launching her own startups and joining Y Combinator, Fai brings a unique consumer social app experience to the world of games. Status blends social media mechanics with role-playing, encouraging users to craft idealised personas and experience virtual fame in AI-generated worlds.
We chatted in person in San Francisco in March, and today we’re pleased to be able to share the full transcript.
Top takeaways from this conversation:
Status reached 1 million registered users within a month of public launch, demonstrating massive potential for AI-driven social roleplay experiences.
Building for young audiences enabled Wishroll to tap into an underserved demographic motivated by fandom, self-expression, and escapism.
Partnering with AI provider InWorld helped the founders overcome technical ML challenges, optimise prompts and reduce operating costs, making the app economically viable at scale.
The game monetises through an energy mechanic similar to casual mobile games, while creating a "non-toxic" alternative to real social media.
AI Gamechangers: Please tell us about your background. How did you come up with Status?
Fai Nur: We're consumer social app founders, and this is our first time building a real game. It’s a mix of social and gaming.
I worked in big tech: at Facebook, at Snapchat. Afterwards, I got into startup stuff and building apps. It was always about building things for my teenage self, building things I would really love! I was super into fandom and fan fiction, things that teenage girls obsess over. I always want to build things for that audience.
There are six of us. I met my first co-founder through Twitter during the Pandemic. We went through [accelerator programme] Y Combinator together. We met the rest of the team that way, and we've been working together now for over three years.
What’s the game’s elevator pitch?
Status is essentially an AI-simulated social media game where the users can become anyone they want in a social media-type feed.
When you come on to Status, a simulated social media universe, the first thing you do is pick who your first follower is. It feels similar to a lot of AI chatbots. But our users create different characters that you can choose to be your first follower. You can search for a variety of different things.
Our users are young. They're teenagers, so it's usually things they like, related to Harry Potter, perhaps, or Star Wars. You also pick who you're going to be as the user. Your persona. Our users don't present just as themselves – they play an idealised version of themselves. So if this were a Star Wars universe, I would be posting as a Jedi, perhaps. Then the game crafts the feed around you.
The first post we generate for you, so you can see how it works. It looks like Twitter. You have a mix of NPCs, AI people who are just talking about you (not necessarily main characters). And there are fake news accounts that post about you. They’re like TMZ, and there’s a fake ESPN-like thing. We wanted it to feel super realistic.
Every time that you post, as well as getting replies and retweets and likes, it also shows the outcome of the posts (maybe you got more followers, and we give humour and “aura” points, that help you level up in the game). It’s a social media feed, and we’ve hyper-gamified it.
“I found it interesting when Character AI started gaining traction. I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed it. I quickly realised that chatting with characters was a way for me to interact with media that I love”
Fai Nur
Our users are young. They tend to be 13- to 18-year-old teenage girls, overwhelmingly. It makes a lot of sense when you think about the players of role-playing games or games like The Sims, which was also an inspiration. One of the top games on Roblox is Brookhaven [RP]. Beyond that, I like reading books and self-insert fan fiction. And [Status] is “social media role play”; it constructs the whole world around you.
And that's the beauty of the LLM: it’s the infinite playability of the product.
Real social media can be toxic. This is like a walled garden, but how do you ensure there are guardrails so the AI responses are appropriate?
The models we use have their own content moderation built in, especially the ones from the big providers. And there is content moderation in our prompts, engineered into the product. Any time you give someone free rein to type in a box or post something, you have to make sure you have really robust moderation in place. The model does handle a lot of it. But also on our end, we have systems in place to make sure things are brand safe.
At first, we thought it was just a really fun and engaging game world. But now, talking to a lot of users, we hear from them, “I prefer this to real social media.” When you think about it, it's not toxic. You're the main character, and you're in charge of your story. Like with any game, you'll get thrown curveballs, but if you are a positive person, you get positivity back.
How do you monetise a simulated social media experience?
You have an energy bar, like in a casual mobile game, so you essentially have a number of “moves” you can use in a day. Once you run out of energy, you can either purchase in-app items that give you more energy to use on the app or you can refer a friend. Otherwise, there’s a limit to how much you can play. It's usually around an hour, which is like a good time to get really in depth. But then, if you want more, you can wait until tomorrow (or pay).
At what point did you partner with InWorld, and what did that enable you to do?
We started building this in August last year. We were in a closed beta period through October. We invited some people on Discord and on TikTok to try it out. It was invite only, and the most important thing for us was figuring out a way to optimise on the cost before we could launch it publicly. AI costs can be a lot.
“Status has a lot of gamified mechanics, but it's also a lot like a social network. We're in a weird space in between. I don't know if it's a new genre, a social network game. It’s like Roblox in the way that you're coming on to ‘hang out’ as much as play”
Fai Nur
We were using [Claude] 3.5 Sonnet, for example, which is an amazing model, but very expensive to use at scale. We thought, “We need to figure out ways to get these costs cheaper so we can actually release this to the world!”
That's when my co-founder found out about InWorld. They’ve been a great partner to us. We're not ML ops people or anything like that. We're consumer founders who just want to build cool features. So they’ve helped us by being that ML ops team. For example, we had a huge prompt that we were pushing into Claude. The 3.5 Sonnet model is great and can handle that. But if you try to put that into a smaller model, it wouldn't be as good.
Engagement is the most important thing. It has to feel realistic or else it’s kind of lame. If it’s just like talking to ChatGPT you're not going to have fun. InWorld helped us with our prompts and evals, with A/B testing, with different models and with direct feedback from our users. We were able to 10x drop our costs.
Almost exactly a month ago, we launched the app publicly. My team are very good at TikTok and organic distribution; we've just grown up on that kind of stuff. So we posted and we shared. We have TikTok, and we have our Discord channel. The app took off! We went from 6,000 people in the beta to 500,000 daily actives. And in one month, over a million registered users. Now those users spend on average over an hour and a half a day on the product.
Is there a winning condition, like a game, or does it go on indefinitely?
It’s very important that it can go on forever, like The Sims, where you could have generations. You could hit over one billion followers on Status, and you could be the most famous person in the whole universe. Or you could play it like real life, and just talk, gain some followers, be content with that. It is what you make it.
I think that's the beauty of Status. It has a lot of gamified mechanics, but it's also a lot like a social network. We're in a weird space in between. I don't know if it's a new genre, a social network game. I like to think of us a lot like Roblox as well. We’re a single-player game, but it’s like Roblox in the way that you're coming on to “hang out” as much as play.
AI tech has come a long way in recent years. Was there a light bulb moment when you realised what was possible?
Our team has built and shipped a bunch of different consumer apps. One of them was a music app that did relatively well in terms of downloads, but we were always searching for what we call the “forever app” that someone would want to come back to. Retention was always our North Star.
I spend a lot of time in fandom spaces, and I found it really interesting when Character AI started organically gaining traction. I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed it and why people were so obsessed with this. I quickly realised, just for myself, that chatting with characters was a way for me to interact with media that I love. That's what those users were doing. They were thinking, “I love Harry Potter. I'm talking to Harry Potter.”
“The app took off! We went from 6,000 people in the beta to 500,000 daily actives. And in one month, over a million registered users. Now those users spend on average over an hour and a half a day on the product”
Fai Nur
I also quickly realised that chatting is cool, but it's pretty open-ended. You don't know where a conversation is going; it’s what you make it, right? It's not necessarily going to be a long-term experience unless you're very creative as a [user], because you're the one who has to drive it.
For us, being in the social media space (my own background is working in social media) I think the exciting thing about LLMs is that you could create a social media role play.
It was already a nascent thing that some people were doing, where they would create fake accounts for idealised versions of themselves and think, “If I were a famous person like a pop star, this is what my social media account would look like.” And that's actually the biggest driver of our engagement. It's not necessarily just people who want to be in Harry Potter or Star Wars, or some media that already exists. A lot of it is people wanting something like The Sims. “I want to experience fame and experience a different life.” And we do that through the lens of social media.
What kind of feedback are you getting from users at the moment?
It's been overwhelmingly positive. They're amazing. If you check our App Store ratings, you’ll see people love the product, and that's what we wanted. We have a Discord community of almost 200,000 users now, which is awesome. It's people sharing what they love about Status, sharing screenshots with each other. It’s super fun.
Our user base is worldwide. Our biggest markets are Brazil and the US, Mexico and Europe. Our users basically realised that they can localise it themselves. They put in their description, “Everyone in here speaks Spanish.” That's another beauty of what we're doing, working with consumer AIs: the LLM is so smart, it can just do it.
What's next on your roadmap?
We have a lot of features that we're really excited about. They’re essentially to make Status more and more immersive.
“Any time you give someone free rein to post something, you have to make sure you have really robust moderation in place. The model does handle a lot of it. But also on our end, we have systems in place to make sure things are brand safe”
Fai Nur
It looks like a regular social feed right now, with text. We want it to be multimodal. Not necessarily AI-generated images, but with you being able to post photos or videos, and having everyone react to those posts.
We just launched a new feature, which was messaging. It’s not like the regular AI chatbot messaging. It's very realistic. You get read receipts, and they can come back and leave again. We wanted to make it feel immersive, fun, and engaging.
Further down the rabbit hole
What’s been happening in AI and games? Here’s some news!
The makers of the popular AI-driven programming tool, Cursor, have raised $900 million in a funding round led by Thrive Capital.
The maker of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 tells The Game Business that he hopes AI will help make development faster and easier.
Google DeepMind vice-president Eli Collins testified in court that Google can train its AI search products, like AI Overviews, on web content even if publishers have opted out.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang will get his first salary increase in a decade, with his 2025 pay rising to $49.9 million.
Supercell has launched an 11-week AI Innovation Lab in Helsinki, bringing together global talent from tech, games, and film to explore the future of AI-driven interactive entertainment.
Epic Games has confirmed it won't enforce rules against AI-generated thumbnails for Fortnite mini-games (but won’t use AI itself to generate its own experiences).
Brimstone AI, the tool AI Gamechangers covered in November, is now available for public testing. Brimstone AI does not generate text but helps writers plan and maintain consistency.
The King's Festival of Artificial Intelligence takes place at King's College London from 20-24 May, exploring the latest developments in AI, with one of its strands being the creative industries. There are free tickets available for its afternoon sci-fi session.
The first ever PG Connects Barcelona takes place 3-4 June, and there will be a dedicated AI-and-games track.
The last PG Connects was in San Francisco, and here’s a video from that event in which Filip Dvorak from Filuta AI talks about game testing with agents.