I have been competing for mayorship of JWT on Foursquare with some guy whose name on the program is Aface K. I tried to figure out who he was by looking through the company's address book with no luck. After I managed to steal it from him twice, he decided that he needed to figure out who his competition was. He called the receptionist and asked who "Katie F." was. He just walked up to my desk and said "you keep stealing my mayorship and it's not cool!" Haha! Some day I'm going to gather all 4 of us at JWT who play this game so that we can compare points and smack talk. 
I recently commented on Gareth Kay's blog about a post he wrote concerning befuckingawesome.com. It's an online game where you gain points for doing good deeds, volunteering, etc. The points that you gain on BFA and 4SQ are fairly meaningless. You don't really win anything by playing, but frequent users are obsessed. Foursquare I was told a few months ago had an active user base of 50 percent - which is huge.
These games keep it simple, they play on the competitive spirit and the human desire to win. Behavioral psychologists have found that competition in sports helps people become better athletes. So is competition in social media helping us become better at social media? Better at using it, better at building it, better at analyzing it?
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