Many online game 'communities' feel like those housing subdivisions spreading around every American city like carcinomas on a pancreas. I live in one such suburban wasteland in northwestern Austin, Texas. Has no mill and few trees. After five years here, I know the names of the couple next door, but nothing about anyone else on this street. No one knows anybody.

There's nowhere to meet, and no reason; the nearest market/bar/bus stop/anything is two miles away. The streets are twisty mazes, the houses endless reshufflings of a dozen bland elements, their plans generated randomly in some nameless architect's CAD/CAM program. A Texas subdivision looks like Connecticut, which looks like Idaho and Georgia. Built by developers without taste or imagination, these soul-dead burbclaves ignore the human-centered design principles in Christopher Alexander's landmark. Such ugly, sterile, crass 1950s Chamber of Commerce concrete-asphalt provincial whitebread burgs count as 'communities' only if you believe their marketing literature.

You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA's,,, Microsoft's, RealNetworks', and many more. These lookalike sites are 'portals' because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like. The portal formula can work like crazy. On the big portals, at any hour, day or night, tens or hundreds of thousands of players gather to play Hearts, Spades, Canasta, chess, backgammon and a zillion shareware match-three games. No one knows how big the casual downloadable market is, but it's growing. RealNetworks just, including year-on-year games revenue growth in Q4 of 52%, to $15.7 million; annual games revenue was $56.3 million, a 63% increase over 2004.

Miniclip claims 27 million unique users each month. Acid pro 7 vst plugins download. Club Pogo has 780,000 paying members. Some other companies are growing the same way, like all those housing sprawls. Phil Steinmeyer [a href='target='_blank' title='Top 10 -] Top 9'>estimates[/a] today's market at around $200 million annually. Leaving aside the unadorned shopping sites, a few portals make cosmetic attempts at community building: chat, buddy lists, forums, profiles and avatars.

All-Star Superman. An alternate version of Parasite appeared in DC Comics' All-Star Superman #5 as an antagonist in the main subplot. He passes by Clark Kent who is interviewing Lex Luthor, a prisoner on Death Row at the 'Stryker's Island' prison. Clark is surprised to see the Parasite, and the entity feeds on Superman's ambient energy.

Sometimes, these use off-the-shelf middleware like. Does better, with player blogs and pages of kid and dog pictures. But portal social scenes are, at best, low-key. You can't tell one community from another. And increasingly, you can't distinguish the games they sell. Volume, Volume, Volume! Casual games look alike, not just because all the portals carry the same games (though they do), but because the portals encourage straight knockoffs of current hits.

Of course, every new game builds, to greater or lesser degree, on earlier designs. And of course, category leaders inevitably spawn imitations. Everyone recognizes the virtues of studying precursors, fixing their mistakes, and making a clone to try out new wrinkles on established ideas. But more and more casual look-alikes zoom beyond 'imitation as sincere flattery' and screech to a halt just inches short of plagiarism. They're not clones but parasites. The portals love them. Last summer, an upstart three-person French company,, made an attention-getting business case for parasitism.