Patent ID: 8826383

Claim:
A method comprising steps of: serving virtual world content stored on a server to a website over the Internet, the virtual world content including a plurality of activities in a virtual world and virtual character content, the virtual character content including a plurality of virtual characters that interact with the plurality of activities in the virtual world, the plurality of virtual characters including a plurality of virtual replicas and a plurality of generic virtual characters; validating a registration code that is associated with a product; responsive to the validating the registration code, permitting user control of a virtual replica of the product in the virtual world content via a user account, the virtual replica being one of the plurality of virtual replicas, and the user account being one of a plurality of premium user accounts; responsive to a request for a temporary user account without said validating said registration code, permitting user control of one of the plurality of generic virtual characters via the temporary user account for a limited time, and the temporary user account being one of a plurality of temporary user accounts; permitting interaction of the virtual replica with another one of the plurality of virtual replicas in the virtual world; preventing all interaction of any of the plurality of generic virtual characters with any of the plurality of virtual replicas; disabling the temporary user account after the limited time, wherein the temporary user account cannot be reenabled after the disabling and wherein the temporary user account is not extendible past the limited time; and after the limited time, allowing a user to obtain another temporary account that permits user control to another one of the plurality of generic virtual characters via the another temporary user account for another limited time, wherein access to the plurality of activities via the virtual world content is provided exclusively to a plurality of authorized user accounts, the plurality of authorized user accounts consisting of the plurality of premium user accounts and the plurality of temporary user accounts, and wherein each of the temporary user accounts expires at a time that is based on when the corresponding temporary user account was created, wherein one of the temporary user accounts expires at a different time than another one of the temporary user accounts.