"Nathan, I think you're right - games are limiting. But no more limiting than any other media genre like books, movies, or music. I think these guys are managing to achieve something that most other LBS applications have not - a use case that makes sense to me. Also, I'd argue that casual games can have a really long shelf life - look at things like Bejeweled, Tetris, Desktop Tower Defense, or any of the big hidden object games. Good games with simple mechanics can remain fun for a very long time, so long as there is something fun and evergreen about the experience. I have a lot of friends, including some of the folks who've commented here, who don't play foursquare competitively (they're not trying to get to the top of any leaderboard) and really would like to use it more as a tracker / recorder of their own movements and places they go. The current version of foursquare doesn't really speak to that use case. Right now, the audience is limited to the devices they support and the..." - Charles Hudson