Designing interaction protocols using noughts and crosses type games

Interaction management is concerned with the protocols that govern structured interactive activities among multiple users or agents in networked collaborative environments. It is an important aspect of networked software in many application domains such as online meetings, online groupware and online games. However, there is limited support in most programming languages and programming environments for implementing interaction management. High-level features, such as interaction protocols and management policies, are usually hard coded by skilled network programmers, who are often scarce in many applications such as e-learning.In this paper, we present an abstraction of various collaborative applications in the form of the noughts and crosses game and its variations. We examine the needs in these games for programming interaction protocols, and propose a comprehensive collection of program constructs for supporting interaction. We report our efforts for incorporating these new constructs into JACIE (Java-based Authoring language for Collaborative Interactive Environments), an existing scripting language designed to support rapid prototyping and implementation of collaborative applications. We demonstrate, through variations of the noughts and crosses game and an on-line bridge game, the usefulness of these language constructs.