You Don't Say
On Sunday, I played "
You Don't
Say" with a few other local dog trainers. It's a fun game
that's supposed to teach the players some of the mechanical and
cognitive skills involved in clicker training, as well as helping
to improve one's technique with positive training methods. The idea
is that you train the other players to perform tasks using random
objects, a clicker, and reward-tokens; no talking, luring, or
mirroring is allowed.
Overall, it was a fun afternoon. However, my main criticism of the
game is that it is too free-form for novices. In my opinion, the
game desperately needs a set of "training cards," each of which
contains a goal behavior, step-by-step training tasks that lead to
the goal, and the clickable criteria for each step along the
way.
Since most of the people I was playing with were experienced
trainers, we were able to make it up as we went along, and managed
to learn some things while having fun. Mostly, without goal cards,
what we learned is that timing is critical, and that identifying
clickable criteria for intermediate steps--or even identifying the
intermediate steps for complex behaviors--can be fiendishly
difficult.
I'd recommend the game as a great thought experiment for
experienced trainers and behaviorists, but think it needs work
before it's a useful game for novice or intermediate
clicker-converts.