I’d like to take a moment here today to talk to you about the business. Oh, sure, there’s plenty of Phyre stuff to talk about, and maybe some Good Things coming up that are maybe more worthy of our time, but that stuff is a little too speculative right now. And I think that the post I’m writing now will be useful enough. Who knows, you might
even enjoy it.
As much as I would like to believe otherwise, Phyre is not an original idea. There have been numerous tools like it, all of which aim to “solve” the problem of RPGs online. There are even a few people who think that the whole idea is ludicrous, that if you have a computer at your disposal you can just play video games so who cares.
I obviously don’t buy that line one bit. RPGs are awesome, and I have without a doubt spent more time roleplaying than I have playing video games. And the bulk of that has been, appropriately enough, online!
In the summer of 1999 I visited my grandparents in California. Though the specifics are lost – I was about 12 at the time – I somehow found myself at a small, dimly-lit shop which sold all manner of roleplaying supplies in addition to the standard array of miniatures, fake trees and foam hills, and Magic cards. I was enthralled, and with the $20 in my pocket I oggled the boxed adventure games for nearly ten minutes before asking for the Dungeons & Dragons set. It was that or the Diablo RPG, you see – it could have gone either way.
The lady at the counter told me that if I could come back next week, they’d have the “three-ee” sets in. I explained politely that I would have gone home by then and that the second-edition set would be very fine, please and thank you. With the sort of look that city people give strange
children who are too pleasant and don’t know what they are buying, she acquiesced. And so began my love affair with a social hobby that is usually enjoyed in basements, by antisocial young men wearing cloaks.
I was excited as anything, so obviously I wasn’t going to wait until I got home to play. So when I tried to play with my brother, at my grandmother’s house, over the large dinner table – things didn’t go well. Though excitingly illustrated, the character sheets were filled with arcane calculations that I could scarcely comprehend, let alone calculate, and the rulebooks were paradoxically both pregnant with possibility and illegible in its presentation. It was a struggle, and I think we got as far as the discovery of Ironstone’s Dog before dinner was ready and we had to set the table and what were all these things doing on the table those are the strangest little dice, what, why are there so many pencils and that was that.
After that, it took me about four years to find a group to play with. When that happened, it was with kids about two hours away by car, and we got to play maybe every third month. It wasn’t the best thing ever, but I lived in the middle of nowhere. What was I going to do about it?
And more than anything, that’s the biggest problem with the hobby today. Forget about market saturation, forget about segmentation – if the reason you aren’t playing is because your group can’t settle on 3.5 versus 4e, you just don’t have a GM who’s interesting enough to remind you that it doesn’t matter. No, the real problem is making games happen at all.
The first version of the setup that would become Phyre was simple: a page with a pJirc client embedded, and an iframe referencing a forum. It was almost slick, and my group was suitably impressed. You could seriously just open it up and type stuff. I added some greyed-out text below the chatbox, explaining some basic IRC commands like /nick and /join. I set up a mIRC dicebot. Man, I was clever.
And it was a failure. It turned out that Alex’s computer didn’t have Java installed. We tried to make it work properly, found out that AOL didn’t actually let that sort of funny business happen, and then Keith’s machine decided that the iFrame should point to Google and nothing we could say would convince it otherwise. Damn.
Over the years my solution changed many times. CGI-IRC? Latency problems, plus it sometimes just eats posts. mIRC for everyone in the group? Apparently some of us couldn’t install software due to system policy restrictions. Oh, and one guy was on a Mac. Eventually It became apparent that even with client issues aside, IRC was just too complicated for most of my players to enjoy.
And so, eventually, it comes to this. Though there are loads of solutions to this problem, they all either run on Java, are costly and proprietary, or just don’t work right. It is a problem so intractable that I had to learn about arcane nonsense like variable scope and SQL injection to solve it properly. And now, you won’t have to.
I used to assume that, since gamers are smart people, they could figure out a complicated solution. I was wrong, though not about gamers being smart. They are, you guys are often brilliant people, but – crucially – not about making The Internet behave properly. And now you don’t have to.
And now the rest of you can do what you’re best at – tell thrilling stories, have amazing adventures, and roll the strangest little dice.
You guys are awesome.
