73 THE JOB’S A GAME: HOW GAME DESIGN BUILDS BETTER TEAMS final gaming essential. A game that you’re required to play is no game at all. Ask anyone who’s suffered through the interminable “Forced Family Fun Nights” of holiday weekends. The goals of games may be childish, silly, or even imaginary, but they are ours, and therefore they matter to us. One of the key drivers of this phenomenon is the interplay of two gaming elements called function and flavor. “Function,” Rosewater explains, “is how the game plays,” the mechanics of the gaming system, including the “definable win condition,”53 the means of play, and so forth. But “[f]lavor, on the other hand, gives the game a metaphor.”54 In terms of function, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is about rolling dice, adding numbers to the dice rolls, and seeing which dice roll higher. However, in terms of flavor, Dungeons and Dragons is about embarking on an epic quest with a group of friends, battling monsters, discovering treasures, and saving the general day. Ask any D&D player what they did over the weekend, and they won’t say, “We rolled dice,” even though, from a completely literal standpoint, that’s what they did. Function may be what we do in a game, but flavor is why we do it, the reason we are willing and even happy to lend our “voluntary participation”55 to an activity with a complete “lack of real-world significance.”56 This dynamic, McGonigal reminds us, is why games feel so good. They trigger our “wholehearted participation,” producing players who are “self-motivated and self-directed, intensely interested and genuinely enthusiastic.”57 Flavor provides a narrative framework within which the plain mechanics of the game are given exciting meaning and purpose, and our work needs flavor as badly as our games. Indispensable to good leadership, Kouzes and Posner report, is the ability to “inspire a shared vision.”58 The foundation of this vision, moreover, must be a set of values which matter deeply, both to the leader59 and to those who follow. Healthy and effective teams are characterized by such a set of shared values,60 a stable and agreed-upon patch of common ground from which everyone can work together. Upon that rock, then, is built a vision of a potential future, a “common purpose”61 toward which every team member believes they are working. This vision should permeate their every task, in the same way that the flavor of a wizard’s duel permeates every corner of Magic: The
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