Sometimes things are presented as a 'challenge' with 'points' and some prize in a lame attempt to gamify things. Pretending that it's not just work, and that a gift card will motivate people is kind of pathetic - it's just a normal part of software development work, the reward is that you get paid, and the software works and is easy to enhance and does what users expect it to.
1) The need to refactor & unit test
2) The perceived need to take part in $team_motivator's challenge idea thing
I'd ask team members:
- How does this project feel to you lately (do they use words like boring / ineffective?)
- What can be done to make this easier on you?
- Anything else you want to do that's not this thing? (Like an unrelated project)
This should be a recurring meeting, where you check in over time.
This way you can remove your own ego-hero from the process, which is known to interfere and boost you while preventing the boosting of others' ego-heroes, thus handing control and interest back to them where possible.
Then what you can do is start to collect ideas, start an idea board, and feel for responses to your idea.
If your idea gets some traction, then you have authentic buy-in to your authentic idea and ergo--team permission & encouragement.
Good luck
I was going to post about a recent experience doing an 'Oncall war-game'. Troubleshooting a prod issue -- the original person was a "dungeon master" that set the scene. Then the rest of the team tried to figure out what was going with the prompts from the DM. It was kinda fun and educational.
This war-game sounds pretty neat.