65 THE JOB’S A GAME: HOW GAME DESIGN BUILDS BETTER TEAMS THE JOB'S A GAME: HOW GAME DESIGN BUILDS BETTER TEAMS Jaclyn Parrish Jaclyn Parrish (DBU '12; B.H. Carrol Theological Institute '21) serves as Director of Marketing at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. Why are games so appealing? They are unproductive and unprofitable. They do not generate sustenance or provide shelter. They have no survival value. Their activities are nonsensical—moving circles across a board? Exchanging painted cards? Stacking pieces of wood? Why would sane people throughout every century and every culture devote their limited time and resources to such activities? And yet we have. From medieval chess to the ancient Olympic Games to Mass Effect 3, humans have built for themselves systems in which we compete (against others, ourselves, or the game itself) to be better at artificial processes which do nothing to feed, clothe, shelter, or otherwise materially profit the players.1 The phenomenon of gaming should therefore be of intense interest to what Robert Cialdini calls the “compliance professionals”2 of the world, who make their living convincing others to say “yes”: lawyers convincing jurors to acquit, marketers convincing customers to buy, politicians convincing constituents to vote, and so forth. These “influencers” spend their careers draining a vast array of resources in hopes of convincing other humans to take reasonable, profitable, and socially acceptable actions, and yet a game designer can convince those same humans to behave in pointless and even bizarre ways with nothing but a piece of cardboard and several sheets of paper. Games, it would seem, are extremely effective systems for directing, managing, and optimizing human action. Perhaps, then, leaders would do well to learn from game designers. A veteran video game designer, Jane McGonigal sets out to explore the enduring appeal of games in Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us
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