[talkingquickly]

I'd be interested to know what people consider a true game mechanic to be. Examples such as the op of including game like behaviour or incentives in interactions we wouldn't normally think of as games is increasingly popular and effective so at what point does it move from "gamification" to a true game mechanic?

[pak]

I would say there are three main elements of game mechanics: 1) rewards or penalties; 2) unpredictability, either through interaction with other players or pure chance; 3) utilizing player skills that can be improved with repeated play experience.

None of those are involved here, except maybe a little bit of 1) if you consider +1 a "visual reward". I'd really expect all three to be involved before saying something has game mechanics--you can easily find each of them in Foursquare, for instance.