jGames – jQuery library for interactive experiments
jGames is a small library of jQuery functions and PHP scripts that are designed to make it easier to program
interactive psychological or economic experiments.
After regularly programming experiments from scratch for my own research in Python or PHP, I started to write
this library, since many of the tasks needed in interactive experiments (e.g. public goods games, contest
games, or bargaining games) are very similar across projects.
The functions carry out regular procedures, like writing/reading data to a
database, a routine for waiting for other participants, interactively showing or hiding content, measuring
reaction times, checking input of users for errors, or viewing the progress of participants on an experimenter
screen.
One advantage of using jQuery in combination with PHP is that experiments can run on a standard Apache server
with a mySQL database (compared to, for example, o-Tree, which requires Django, a more sophisticated web
framework).
As a disclaimer, these scripts have not been written with the intention
to provide a full-fledged, easy-to-use solution, like o-Tree or z-Tree. There might be still bugs and some
functions could be programmed more elegantly or more user-friendly. I still thought I share the plugin
here, as it made me much more efficient in setting up my own experiments and may be of some use for people who
already have some background knowledge in HTML, PHP, and jQuery.
The code is available for download, but a manual and example code is currently still work in progress.