From Joycast to GameAgora: How Turning Phones Into Controllers Sparked a Bigger Idea

A couple of years ago, I built something simple: a small tool that lets people turn their phones into virtual joysticks for games running on a computer. I named it Joycast, and made it available for all as opensource: github.com/zenineasa/joycast

The idea was straightforward - run the software, scan a QR code that appears on your phone and the phone instantly gets mapped onto some keys on your keyboard. Multiple people can scan the QR codes and different sets of keys are mapped. There were no restrictions on what kind of games it could be used on, as long as these games could be played solely using the keyboard.

At the time, it was just something fun to build. A way to solve a practical problem: how to play multiplayer games without actually having to buy separate joysticks and/or keyboards. As I shared it with friends and watched them actually use it, I began to see something way bigger.

Joycast was not just a tech experiment; it was a social experiment.

It showed that when people have a fast and intuitive way to join a shared experience, they'll do it; especially in casual settings where the barrier to entry matters most. It also revealed some very real constraints. Because Joycast relied on keyboard mapping, since a computer keyboard only has a limited number of usable keys, the number of players it could support was inherently capped. On top of that, most computer games themselves are designed with fixed limits on how many people can play on a single machine. Even so, something interesting kepy happening: people were still tempted to scan the QR code and try to join. They would only discover the limit later, when there were not more "slots" left. The desire to participate was stronger than the system could support.

That pattern stayed with me. The technology had clear ceilings, but the human behaviour did not. People kept trying to join because the act of joining felt easy, immediate and social. The bottleneck wasn't interest; it was infrastructure. Joycast had accidentally revealing something important: public shared screens do not suffer from a lack of willingness to engage; they suffer from systems that are not built to scale that engagement beyond a handful of players.

GameAgora grew out of that realization. It takes the same core idea of using people's phones as joysticks, and applying it to spaces that are naturally social: malls, cafés, lounges, events, etc. where people are already waiting, gathering and looking for something to do together. No more constraints; GameAgora is designed for and supports exclusively massively multiplayer games.

Joycast was small, imperfect and limited, but it was honest. It showed how quickly people are willing to step into something playful when the barrier is low enough. GameAgora is simply the next step in that same line of thinking. In that sense, GameAgora is not a new idea at all; it's what happens when an experiment stops being theoretical and starts responding to how people really behave.