Taking a more playful approach to your fanbase can help drive increased engagement and traffic for your fan page. One technique is the use of game mechanics. The goal of game mechanics is to keep customers coming back and doing what you want them to do through incentives and rewards.

The exercise was to take typical calendar events (a day of four events was provided as an example) and turn them into a game. The notion that this is possible comes from Danc’s post about Ribbon Hero on Lost Garden, where he writes:
If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.
Each pair of designers was to apply the following game mechanics to their calendar schedule: points, levels, quests, feedback and inventory. As no concern was to be given for the interface itself, wireflows were used to illustrate the mechanics in use.

The following was published in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine… Who decides what a game is about? At first glance, the popular board game Ticket to Ride seems to be another link in the great chain of rail baron games, such as Age of Steam, Eurorails and the 1830 series. During the game, the player draws unique route challenges, to connect certain pairs of cities – New York to San Francisco, Miami to Chicago, and so on.