Managing interaction for multimedia collaboration: through the keyhole of noughts and crosses games

Interaction management is concerned with the protocols that govern structured interactive activities among multiple users or agents in distributed and collaborative environments. Research in this area has largely been carried out in specific application domains, such as 3D virtual environments. We present an abstraction of various collaborative applications in the form of variations of noughts and crosses. We examine the needs in these games for programming interaction protocols, and propose a comprehensive collection of program constructs for supporting interaction management. We demonstrate, through these variations of the game, the usefulness of these language constructs.