Six months ago, I signed up on the social networking/game service Foursquare. Today, I decided to give it up altogether.

I’d never touched Dodgeball, Foursquare’s presumptive predecessor, but I’d heard great things from my co-workers and other digerati friends, so I hopped on the Foursquare bandwagon. I’ve been personally and professionally interested in the integration of online social networks and offline realworld activities for the better part of a decade now. At first, Foursquare held plenty of promise around that integration. Also, I love exploring where I live, and thought I might be able to discover new places (and/or new friends to roam around town with).

Pretty quickly, I discovered the site’s biggest form of gratification: its achievements system. I unlocked a couple of achievement badges, and I became the make-believe mayor of several places on my usual rounds, including the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Fantastic! Who doesn’t like achievements and being awarded badges and mayorships?

Over time, I began to notice that the achievements wound up being almost the only benefit from using the service. Any attempts I’ve been making to visit new places has had almost nothing to do with Foursquare; Foursquare just gave me a place to show off about my social resourcefulness, and ultimately that’s not why I go to new places. Instead, I’d either occasionally get a badge or a mayorship. Neither of them have any inherent value other than bragging rights, which again is not why I do much anything. Maybe I’m peculiar psychologically in this right, but if the only motivator for using a Web service is to look cooler than school, I’ve got better things to do with my time and bandwidth.

A few weeks ago, I managed to less-than-intentionally snag the mayorship of a Peet’s Coffee shop three blocks from my apartment. No big deal, nothing I was really vying for — I’d just gotten in the habit of checking in wherever I could. Then I saw an interesting tweet:

“I’m sick of this @arsenio guy bouncing my mayorship of Peet’s. I guess I know where I’m going for coffee tomorrow…”

We traded tweets, and there was no real bad blood… but there’s something about that exchange that still feels like the opposite of good social networking. I don’t want to make friends through competition, Game Nights notwithstanding.

Today I was out being social, and we happened to be driving across the Bay Bridge, and I was getting ready to check-in… almost entirely because I want to preserve my mayorship. Worse, fiddling with my phone, I realized I was in that moment being particularly antisocial. That was my final straw. The game had not fulfilled any of that initial promise for me, and I was beginning to think it was actually making my social skills a little weaker in the bargain.

It still remains a fun premise, and the power of achievements cannot be understated to anyone who cares to build web services with high stickiness or user engagement. But to my mind there’s also plenty of devilry in the details.