I wan't to know if there is a modern way to detect how an event was triggered i.e. if it was a mouse click or was the code video.play() ran (With video of course being the result of a document.getElementById('video')). And if not is there a way to run video.play() without triggering an event (this seems unlikely but i'll take a shot at asking).

My issue is that i'm building a system to play videos in sync. So when I send a request to play a video and the other user receives that request it uses video.play() to play their video. Only problem is when video.play() fires on the receiving end it also triggers the event to send a request back to the original user to play the video which ends up sending two requests, this can easily turn into an infinite loop if a user clicks pause / play during this period.