Simon Says, use AI to generate a photo of people playing Simon Says.

Simon Says is a call and response game which many of us will remember from when we were kids. One person is nominated as Simon and everybody else watches Simon and listens for instructions, which could be pretty much anything. For example, jump up and down, or touch your head etc. The catch is, you only follow instructions which are preceded by the words “Simon Says”, so for “Simon Says raise your arms” you would raise your arms and for “Raise your arms” you would do nothing. Anyone who gets this wrong is eliminated, until either everyone is out or the last person left in the game becomes the new Simon.

Simon Says is such a simple game that it’s been adapted for countless different countries and cultures, often with local variations of the rules. The name “Simon Says” is an alliteration, which works in English and is why the name is often changed in different languages. (In French, it’s called “Jacques a dit” which in English is “Jacques said”, but being Australian it looks more like it’s pronounced “Jack’s a tit”, But enough of that – without actually knowing Jack it’s hard to know.)

I had a question in a recent workshop about whether the game Simon Says generates cognitive load or even cognitive overload. If you’ve taken one of our classes then you’ll know about cognitive load and divided attention and why it’s important for improvisation, so I won’t go into that here. Suffice to say, cognitive load helps remove that ill–informed conscious critic voice in our head.

Simon Says takes advantage of a muscle in our brain which allows us to switch between automating responses (doing what we’re told) and executive control (the conscious critic stepping in and checking the instructions for the game). This creates divided attention and cognitive switching, and thus cognitive load. But is it enough to overload?

Like many of these games – especially when used in improv – the speed of the game is important. If Simon gives an instruction, everyone figures out the appropriate response, and then there’s a pause to eliminate people and possibly laugh. This is just the way the mind works. Divided attention, cognitive load, it’s just a fun game about messing with your head a little. And the more you play at normal pace, the better your head will get at internalising good play – basically you get better the more you do it, similar to Keith Johnstone’s Hat Game which is discussed in our book Inside Improvisation.

Play it at speed however, and things really begin to change. Cognitive load increases because the switching time has increased, thus taking more cognitive power. And because the game is going fast and we need time to look back at what just happened, that also adds to the amount of cognitive load, and could even approach a point of cognitive overload if played fast enough. So yes, Simon Says can generate cognitive load if played a certain way, and possibly overload if pushed.

However, the underlying question is not really whether it generates cognitive load or overload, but whether it does it well. This is where we start to bring in other games and exercises in improv classes and why you’ll rarely if ever find Simon Says in improv.

When we talk about Improv exercises, most people think oh I want to learn that skill so I’ll use that exercise because it’s for that. Or, I can’t use that exercise because that’s not the skill that I’m working on right now – as if every exercise has one skill focus and that’s it. Most exercises address multiple skills though, so it’s not about which exercise is used to target a particular skill but how well does every exercise do at addressing that skill. And most exercises also have negative effects in some areas, so while you’re getting the benefits in some skills, it’s at the expense of other skills. It’s not just using the best tool for the job, it’s using the best tool that doesn’t have too many side effects… for the job.

So for example, the game Bippity Bippity Bop works on visual and auditory listening skills, response to impulse skills, physical expression and mime skills, internalising game rules, cognitive overload (at speed), being in the moment, and is a general warm up game, amongst others. Bippity Bippity Bop works on mime skills but there are much better exercises for working on mime skills so we don’t use it for that purpose. Likewise it also works for listening to impulse in the moment skills, but again there are much better exercises for this purpose. There’s a lot of skills that Bippity Bippity Bop doesn’t work on – scene progression response for example – and several things that Bippity Bippity Bop is actually detrimental for with beginner improvisors in the way it is usually framed. It can reduce confidence, make people nervous, and teaches failure and that failure is penalised, amongst others. Every improv exercise has several benefits and detriments, and knowing this for each exercise makes for a much better improv teacher.

Simon Says works on some of the same skills as Bippity Bippity Bop and other games, but there are much better exercises and games for each of those skills. Plus, the base game has an attribute that’s really bad for improv classes: player elimination. Warm up games are for warming up, so why would you play a game that eliminates people so they have to sit out and not warm up? If you’re an AOI student you probably don’t know many if any elimination games, but if you trained elsewhere then you may know a whole bunch of them. That’s not to say Simons Says is a bad game, it’s just more fun at speed and with variations that creatively remove eliminations.