There is a very easy challenge levelled at Virtual Worlds and social media in general - "Why would you bother?" David Armano covered something like this in The Delicious Lesson.
And it is a very good point. Second Life has moved from cool new thing to must do to embarassing phase we went through to subject of faint ridicule in a dizzyingly short period of time. And if your experience was anything like mine, you joined up, wandered around, did a sky dive and then kind of ran out of stuff to do.
Football Superstars seeks to change that with a new virtual world based around soccer. The twist? If you're good at the game, you get to be an in-game celebrity (with better clothes, access to cooler clubs, and media requests) Read on....
Football Superstars is in closed Beta, so I can't tell you too much about the gameplay, but I like the idea. You take the role of a soccer player on a team. Your team is made up of other users. So every player is individually controlled. You can form teams and join a league and if you're good enough, you turn pro. Become a player in both senses of the word. Buy better clothes and gain entry to clubs in the virtual city Football Superstars is based in. From the screen shots, it seems a lot of these clothes seem to be available at the Puma Store.
One thing leapt out at me from one of the previews - "after a couple of minutes, you stop playing a football game and start playing football". It looks like FS, like WoW before it, has cracked the gameplay element, and then built a social network beside that. My guess is that you will have some very good players who never socially interact beyond the game, some average players who are always hanging about, and some terrible hangers-on who never go anywhere else. In short, a bit like real life.
FS is free - it is advertiser funded and Puma seem to have taken a big presence in the initial game. As the game evolves, the role Puma plays is going to be very interesting. Step one - stick your branding up everywhere. Step two - Puma boots improve your performance? Step Three - Puma sign you up as amabassador? You appear in a virual ad for a virtual world as a Puma ambassador?
If the essence of storytelling is to bypass the rational and make an emotional appeal to the senses, I think Puma have a chance to strike gold with this tie-up. If it can inspire a percentage of the devotion that WoW delivers, and Puma is bound up in that experience then some great advocacy is created. Hopefully, one day they will design, market and sell boots exclusively in the game, only to then make them in real-life because demand is so great.
It's an easy sell for Puma, but if your demographic isn't 18-44 year old football fans, what are you to do? I'd suggest talking to your customers, finding out where they hang out (virtually speaking), and see if you can usefully get involved.
(This post gives me an excuse to post this Addidas clip, featuring Stephen Gerrard. Is it real? Hmmm.)