People have been forming communities and groups long before the advent of social software, computers and even written records.  Yes, technology helps us surmount the barriers of time and space.  It helps us manage more and larger groups than we could handle alone.  It provides new tools - but at bottom, social software is just a technology that addresses very old, very human and very messy needs.

At a recent talk sponsored by the Information Law Institute and NYU's Center for Advanced Technology, Lee Sproull discussed this human aspect of computer-mediated communities - why people join, why they stay, and what they get out of it.  Part of how she defines these groups is that they involve people with a common interest.  Online, people aren't limited by geography, age or other real-life factors that provide the coherence factor for real-world groups to form.  Instead, the groups that form online are more explicitly purposeful than those influenced by real life.  In the absence of accident, people find reasons to get together.

While Sproull explicitly excludes games from her definition of community, I would argue that games are a key form of social software.  As Sproull explains, online groups don't form without a reason.  Games, however, provide an immediate reason for people to interact with each other as well as an obvious set of topics to discuss - insta-sticky, if you will.

Some games make their social content and innovation explicit, like Game Neverending.  Some are almost entirely centered around emergent social interaction, like There and the rest of the upcoming crop of open-ended shared spaces.  Others don't include any built-in support for social interaction - but when there are not one but ninety-eight Cribbage discussion groups on Yahoo alone, games are doing something right at getting people to talk to each other.