The only kind of non-gimmicky team building exercise I've ever experienced was a group project that cleared a series of hurdles for a project and was able to regroup and use those insights for the next several projects, to make it suck less. This in my professional experience has only ever happened twice in two different work environments. Generally, your definition of longstanding (e.g. lord of the flies) usually at the cost of denying a genuine problem that eventually kills the group or organization in question - that's what I am used to seeing.