That’s what our users say when asked why they’ve still been playing our game knighthood for the past year.

I get excited when I hear this because it means we truly are doing something new in gaming.  For almost all games out there, what keeps people engaged are solid game mechanics, immersive and intuitive experiences, and amazing media.  It’s all about the game and building upon the game-to-player relationship.

What’s innovative about what we do is that we’re about people and building communities using a gaming framework.  We’re not just building games.  We build the world context, the tools, the relationships among players and let our them meet each other, socialize and entertain themselves.

I’d pick a great community over a great game any day.

I get asked this question quite a bit.

Social gaming can mean a lot of different things, as it is a very new gaming market that people are just starting to explore and define.

For me, though, there are a couple of key principles that define social gaming and set it apart from games that have come before it.

Principle #1: Social games add a framework for user-to-user relationships within the game.

All games have “game mechanics”, but social games have “social mechanics” as well.  For example, Knighthood uses a pyramid organization to generate ranking and power.  A player’s rank is determined by the people in his/her pyramid, or in what is called the player’s “liege line.”  Another use of relationships in knighthood is the idea of the war triangle of attacker-defender-hostage.  I talk about this more in depth in my personal blog.

Principle #2: Social games are about giving players the tools and scaffolding to create their own entertainment within the game context.

This is another topic I’ve written about in more depth here.  Traditionally, game design has been about creating controlled experiences.  But in this age of the web, where users now have the tools to control how they consume, share, and create content, social games should also be about giving up control and allowing people to exercise their own imagination and creativity to entertain each other.

These ideas aren’t necessarily new. You can find cooperative or competitive group play in many multi-player console and pc games.  What’s exciting is that the web makes it viable to create games that are solely based around rich social play.  And I think this will lead us into new areas for how we will relate, interact, and entertain each other in the future.