66 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Better and How They Can Change the World. She examines the structure and function of games, and explains in detail how and why humans enjoy them, often more than we enjoy reality itself. Her work is insightful and engaging on its own, but when examined alongside the research of James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner’s The Leadership Challenge, a pattern emerges: what people want out of leadership is strikingly similar to what we want out of games, and this alignment has multiplicitous implications for leadership theory and team-building strategies. But before we can examine this alignment in detail, we must first define what a game is. What, ontologically speaking, differentiates charades from mime (apart from the gloves), and boxing from barroom brawls (apart from the gloves)? A simple, working definition of games can be devised from the work of McGonigal and of another accomplished game designer, Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering since 2003. With their combined insights, we can identify five essential characteristics which make a game a game. The first is a goal or set of goals, “the specific outcome that players will work to achieve.”3 Rosewater observes that “the goals can be active (defeat the enemy) or passive (don’t die),” but regardless, “[t]here needs to be a point to a game.”4 Second, a game must have “rules”5 or “restrictions.”6 A game with no rules is not a game, Rosewater argues, but an activity, and “[i]t’s something to do, but it’s not something to solve.”7 Games need restrictions and challenges which players must creatively overcome. McGonigal points out a third hallmark which, while perhaps philosophically included in the concept of a goal, will nevertheless be helpful to our discussion: a “feedback system [which] tells players how close they are to achieving the goal.”8 This could be a hit points system or a progress bar or a stack of plastic chips, but some mechanic which measures the relative effectiveness of the players’ actions is, if not absolutely essential, deeply satisfying and practically ubiquitous in the world of games. Rosewater identifies a fourth hallmark which is intimately related to the concept of a feedback system, namely player “agency.”9 The decisions and actions of the player must have a direct and measurable effect on the world of the game, otherwise the act of playing has no meaning.
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