If it was a week long, in a desirable location, and I could take my fiancee, I'd be all for it. But it's 1.5 days, no SOs, and held in a casino in the ass end of bumfuck Indiana. And forget about working -- it's centered around a team-building exercise with people from other parts of the company you probably don't know and will never talk to again.

I understand the “why” of team building, but the “what” or “how” the team-building is done often handled in such a hackneyed top-down way that I often wonder “if you just brought the team together, gave them options on ways to spend their time together, would they otherwise choose to do the same activities the managers designed for the event”?

That’s more rhetorical than anything and is a roundabout way of saying: most organized team building events are just…boring.

It’s also just a preference though: getting together and just hanging out without the pressure to talk shop or participate in some kind of coordinated, planned and overly-orchestrated activity is just as engaging for me as “escape rooms” or “games” or other “activities”.

Yeah, some alternative scenario where we're given time to get to know folks at our own pace would be nicer. Like, here's some drinks, here are some board games, mingle, maybe talk about work, maybe not, make some connections. Instead we're under pressure to do some silly game that has only the faintest connection to anything the company does or stands for.

Maybe I'm just too bitter. Maybe if I stayed for the afterparty I'd get the kind of interaction I want. But late night carousing isn't my kind of thing generally.

These sound like two different sorts of trips, and two very different sorts of companies.

lol was the company 84.51/dunnhumby

I will neither confirm nor deny that speculation. ;)