How do people “game” Foursquare?

This is an excellent question that touches on two different aspects of "gaming": the creation of a game and a way to game, or cheat, the game.

Foursquare is a social media company designed to help drive consumers (Foursquare users) to merchants (Foursquare business partners). In this way, Foursquare can be considered a social media alternative to mainstream advertising.

To encourage people to use Foursquare (and thus achieve the consumer-merchant connection), the company uses a process called gamification. Gamification is the application of a competitive game-like environment to a non-game business model that is competitive and offers rewards for those who play the game regularly.

In this case, the Foursquare game is played by users, via a cell phone application, who "check in" to various merchants that they frequent, with the hopes of gaining discounts and special deals from the merchants. To make the game interesting and competitive, Foursquare allows the game player to earn badges and points for frequenting both new and previously visited merchants, locate/follow friends, broadcast their own check in locations and boast of achievements to their friends via social media ("I am the Mayor of Starbucks!").

That is the gamification of Foursquare – leveraging a game-like system as a way for Foursquare, and their merchant partners, to drive business in a "fun" way.

Now to the issue of "gaming" Foursquare.

When we talk of “gaming” a game (like Foursquare), we are essentially talking of a way to beat (or cheat) the system. People who "game" Foursquare are looking for ways to "win" without having to actually play the game on a competitive level with other players. The easiest way to do this is through checking in to merchant locations without actually physically being at the merchant location (they do restrict how often you can check in, so sitting in a coffee shop and checking in every 5 minutes won’t get you any Foursquare points).

Checking in to a remote location is fairly easy, especially if the user is using a cell phone with limited geo-location awareness - a critical point since Foursquare uses your cell phone’s "reported" location, via either GPS or cell-tower triangulation depending upon the phone, to find you and suggest nearby merchants. I stress the word reported since the accuracy of geo-location depends highly on both the cell phone manufacturer (who may restrict GPS usage to save battery life) or the service provider (who may not be able to accurately pinpoint a phone's exact location due to cell tower locations).

From my own personal experience, Foursquare offers up locations to check in from as far as 10 miles away (including, interestingly, airline flights on my Foursquare iPhone app).

So if you want to get kicked out of Foursquare (and be the Mayor of Nowhere), that is how you “game” the game of Foursquare.