Inside Social Games

Rockstar Cars is a Facebook game that lets you “race” your friends, create teams, and display your achievements like medals of honor on your Facebook profile. As you play the game, recruit friends, and form teams, you earn points that allow you to upgrade your car from a dumpy looking van all the way up to sleek and sexy sports car.

Rockstar Cars integrates with Facebook pretty well. Perhaps the biggest draw is displaying your awards (namely your car) on your Facebook profile. This simple addition is attractive to most players, creating a form of bragging rights. Bragging rights is a critical feature to have in most online games, for many players will play games just for that one moment to show off.

Secondary to the display of one’s cars, the game coaxes you into social interaction in several ways. You acquire points for inviting people to play and more for forming teams. These points are then used purchase better and better vehicles. Furthermore, the game has built in chat and clubs to join.

While the chat itself is just an added bonus, you can also use points you earn to join clubs. These various clubs not only encourage the formation of online teams, guilds, clans, or whatever you want to refer to them as, but joining them also affects game play.

When you join a club, it grants you extra races a day (when starting out, you can only run 10 races every 24 hours), and earns you what is called “Rockstar Dollars.” This is where we reach a bit of a disappointment. When we start the race, there is an interesting RPG element to it, and you can use the Rockstar Dollars to sabotage your opponents. This is a simple, yet effective game play element: you select an option and, like in a turn-based RPG, a random number calculator determines the outcome. You almost expect an old school, Dungeon and Dragons style race (something like X happens: You do 1, 2, or 3?), but as soon as you click the race button…. the race is over and it randomly selects a winner. What the hell kind of race is that?! Considering the depth of thought put into the social networking aspect of the game, the actual game play was rather disappointing.

Even though the game itself is a let down, it does have tremendous potential, and it’s on the right track with the RPG elements. Rockstar Cars effectively utilizes the social capabilities of Facebook using achievement displays, encouraging multi-person play, joining of clubs, and supported chat. However, if they took the RPG element further and made an entire race out of it, the game would be made exponentially better.

It cannot be denied that the game is successful, with approximately 11,000 daily players - but considering you only actually play for about 10 seconds per race, how many are actually “playing” and how many are networking?