In Happy Street, there is a clone of Simon that you can play a few times every day to get its premium currency (i.e., Flooz). You’ve probably played Simon before even if you don’t know the name. The game is simple – repeat the pattern that is played and each time you successfully repeat it, the pattern gets longer by 1. I had an electronic version of Simon when I was a kid, and played it for awhile. I don’t remember if I was good or bad at it, but I do remember that it wasn’t that fun.

However now, If you’re too cheap to pay real, hard cash for the premium currency in Happy Street (hi!), then you end up playing Simon a few times a day. They try and make it challenging so that you only get your reward if you attain a pattern of sufficient length. First you have to get 8, then 9, then 10 for your Flooz, although this limit resets every day.

After playing it for a few weeks now, I noticed a couple of things:

• The game is much easier if I assign notes to each of the four colors. If I just try and memorize the pattern, I’ll forget or mess up before I hit a length of 8; but it is a lot easier (for me) to memorize a melody that is created by the pattern even if the melody doesn’t make sense.
• I recognize that my memory is performing chunking often in sets of 3, 4 or 6. The most notable are patterns ones like abab or abcb or abcd. This also makes the game a lot easier especially when there are other things happening in the background
• There is no incentive to get a length beyond ~12. At that point, even with chunking and association, it requires some thought and/or cognitive load, and since it’s a game I just give up.

I had read about chunking and know that it happens, but it’s neat to see its effects on something as simple as Simon.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, games, memory