Seaweed : a Web application for designing economic games

Abstract

Seaweed is a web application for experimental economists with no programming background to design two-player symmetric games in a visual-oriented interface. Games are automatically published to the web where players can play against each other remotely and game play is logged so that the game's designer can analyze the data. Seaweed's interface draws heavily on interface features of Microsoft PowerPoint'" and ExcelTM, which experimental economists are familiar with. The design and implementation challenge in Seaweed is to provide an end user programming environment that creates games responsive to events and controlled by logic without the designer understanding programming concepts such as events and synchronization, or being burdened by specifying low-level programming detail. Seaweed achieves this by providing high-level visual representations for variables, control flow, and logic, and by automating behaviors for event handling, synchronization, and function evaluation. Seaweed contributes a end-user programming tool for economists, as well as generalizable designs for representing programming concepts visually. It also demonstrates that Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a viable platform for forming partnerships between people and paying them to perform cooperative tasks in real-time, cheaply and with high through put.