# Implementation and Evaluation of a Serious Game for Working Memory Enhancement
## Game Design and Description  
The game's main goal is to improve and increase the players' WM capacity by utilizing repetition and concentration. The design of the game was built and based on findings of previous research regarding WM training and a specialized psychologist's guidance and directions. In order to achieve WM's improvement, the game was designed in a way that the player must be able to remember as many items as possible during a predefined time period. We decided to follow a web-based approach, so that our application can be accessed by anyone who possess a PC/laptop and an internet connection. In addition, due to the game's design, we needed to make sure that there was enough screen real estate, so it would be almost impossible to support mobile devices for the time being. The main gameplay consists of a variable size grid with tiles on it that represent the steps a player should make in order to complete an entire path. The system of the game generates random paths with start/end points and each path is presented to the player gradually, one tile each time. The player starts with an initial route length, which is depicted in the form of flashing tiles sequentially, and the player must repeat the depicted paths successfully without deviating from the original path. The scalable difficulty of the game lies in the number of steps each route has, as after successful repetitions of a route, the game generates routes with an increased number of steps. For instance, the player can start with a route of seven steps, and after repeating it correctly, the game presents a route of eight \"steps\" and so on. Each new tile flashes on the screen for one second and it disappears right after. The route resets to the starting point and the player must repeat all the steps, including the new tile that flashed right before. We tried to keep the game's interface as simple as possible, so that it does not require much effort and can be played by anyone, with or without knowledge regarding video games. Following that direction, the game has a single main screen containing the grid and information about the player's performance and the level where the player is (difficulty level, current path length, score, etc.). As depicted in Figure 1, regarding the difficulty level, the player can see the information on the top right corner, which shows options like easy, medium, hard, very hard and insane (see section b in the aforementioned figure), which correspond to the grid size. Moving to the bottom (section c in Figure 1), there is a reversed pyramid which fills as the player manages to complete paths of increased size. The next one (section d in Figure 1) is the current path length indicator, which informs the player with the number of steps that each route has. Finally, the last element is the player's score (section e in Figure 1), which is calculated by the grid size, the path length and the number of repetitions for the current path length, also considering any mistakes that the player may have made. Of course, there is a registration screen where the player provides any necessary information in order to be identified by the system, so that they can be tracked and evaluated performance-wise (Figure 1 presents a sample of that screen). As a final addition, we included a leaderboard screen, where players can check their ranking among all players. When the player logs into the game, the grid size reflects her/his current performance, which translates to the number of items that can be stored in her/his WM. When the player logs in for the first time, the grid size reflects the player's performance on the pre-test results, which will be discussed further later on. For example, if a player scored a Corsi block span of seven, they would start in a \(7\times 7\) grid. However, if a player scored six in the pre-test, they would start in a \(5\times 5\) grid, as there is no option for even-number grid size and it would more suitable for them to start in a lower grid size as well.